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Lightning fast luge
By Brady Snyder
Deseret News staff writer
If you've ever leaned back slowly in a chair, teetered on the brink of losing your balance, then accidentally plunged backward toward the ground — you might know what it's like to luge.
The analogy is how Olympic hopeful Ashley Hayden describes her sport. It is that helpless moment you experience during the split-second after you realize you're falling backward.
Take that half-second, multiply it by 90 and you'll sample a 5-second run at Utah Olympic Park, home to Olympic luge competition during Salt Lake's 2002 Winter Games.
Luge, an Olympic sport since 1964, requires competitors to lie prone, feet first, and then propel themselves down a steeply inclined ice track.
The sport is known for speed and close competition. It's the only Winter Olympic event measured to the thousandth of a second.
In a sport that's the fastest among Olympic sports and is akin to free-falling, it would seem like mental toughness is less important than a simple reckless disregard of fear.
But luge, it turns out, is more mental than would be expected.
You can, in fact, choke.
"The biggest problem for people is choking," Hayden said. "You need to be relaxed. You can't all of the sudden tense up. When you get nervous you tense up and that can make you lose."
Hayden and teammates Brenna Margol and Courtney Zablocki are some of America's Olympic hopefuls who consult sports psychologists.
The sessions are not designed to check why somebody would want to scream down a sheet of ice at 90 mph, but they rather help the athletes maintain mental focus.
"There's going to be thousands of spectators during the Olympics, whereas in most events there's maybe 100 or so," Margol said. "We have to be prepared for that."
Choking mostly comes into play during starts.
Lugers begin by sitting up on their sleds. They rock their sled back while holding onto bars at either side of them. Then with a tremendous push they slingshot forward and begin paddling down the track. After a few feet, sliders assume the prone position for the remainder of the ride.
If you're are nervous, Hayden said, you can slingshot yourself right into the track wall.
While in the prone position, lugers try to keep their toes pointed inward and, whenever possible, keep their head down so the body is more aerodynamic.
In doubles competition, the "bottom man" rides in front on a two-seat sled while the "top man" slips in below and behind the partner. The pair tandem down the track together with the bottom person using feet to steer and the top person balancing the sled with the upper body.
U.S. sliders have logged countless practice runs on the Olympic park raceway.
By comparison, the competition will have only a couple dozen runs on the track, giving American lugers an advantage they hope will produce medals.
"We've had so many runs, you know every turn and you know what to do," U.S. Olympic hopeful Nick Sullivan said. "The disadvantage for other countries is that they've only had 10 or 20 runs."
The track is tucked away in pristine Bear Hollow near Kimball Junction outside Park City. It's not uncommon to see moose or eagles while taking in an event at the track, which also serves as the home for Olympic bobsled and skeleton.
At the 1998 Nagano Games, traditional powerhouse Germany won all three golds in men's singles, women's singles and doubles, in which two competitors lay staggered on a two-seat sled.
But those same Olympics were huge for the Americans.
For the first time, U.S. lugers medaled at an Olympic Games. Doubles sliders Chris Thorpe and Gordy Sheer took the silver while teammates Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin won bronze. Besides being an American first, the two medals represented the first time in the sport's Olympic history that a country besides Germany, Austria, Italy or the former Soviet Union won any luge medal.
While Sheer has since retired and Thorpe has a new partner, Grimmette and Martin remain America's top medal hopefuls in 2002.
E-MAIL: bsnyder@desnews.com
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