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Sports
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| Marion Trott | Les Wiseman
November 2009
Movie Entertainment
The International Olympic Committee refers to a trio of sports – bobsleigh, luge and skeleton – as sliding. It should really be called totally crazy, breakneck speed on a few pieces of fibreglass and metal in ways slightly more controlled than dropping off a cliff.
The record for bobsleigh speed is 201 kilometres an hour, though in competition it usually amounts to a mere 130 to 147 km/h for 1,400 metres. That generates five Gs of centripetal pull, about the same as a dragster. Luge and skeleton hit about the same speeds, and on banked curves can generate up to seven Gs. Skeleton, mind you, has no steering or brake mechanisms. To steer, you lean your body; to slow down, you drag your toes. Plus, you’re going face-first!
In the last year, Germany’s Marion Trott, 24, has become the one to beat in women’s skeleton. She won gold on the new Whistler Sliding Centre and in Park City, Utah, as well as setting a track speed record at Lake Placid, N.Y. Though the prevailing wisdom is that the outcome of a sliding race is pretty much decided at its launch, Trott has been able to overcome lagging starts because of unerring abilities to find the fastest lines of the track and to corner cleanly.
Our Canadian heroine is Mellisa Hollingsworth, 29, of Eckville, Alta. Though Hollingsworth placed a disappointing ninth at the Whistler Sliding Centre late last season, she scored gold at the World Cup event in Park City.
The most respected man in skeleton is Calgary’s Jeff Pain, always recognizable in competition with his snarling beaver helmet. He’s 39, so the 2010 Olympics might be his last big competition. He has had a stellar career of more than 13 years and is considered the most accomplished Canadian athlete to come out of the sport.
Pain is said to have invented the one-handed push start, which revolutionized skeleton. He captured many World Cup championships, was twice world champion and won an Olympic silver at the 2006 Torino Winter Olympic Games. Though bobsledding as a sport has existed since the late 19th century and was one of the sports at the first winter Olympics in 1924, Canadians did not start competing until the late 1950s. Women began competing only in the 1990s.
It’s a team sport of two or four members, but pilots and brakemen get most of the glory. Helen Upperton, 30, is considered Canada’s top women’s pilot. With brakemen (still the politically correct term in the sport) Heather Moyse and Jennifer Ciochetti sharing duties, their sled is the one to watch in 2010.
Upperton won Canada’s first World Cup gold in women’s bobsleigh in 2006 and finished fourth at the Torino Olympics. On the 2008 World Cup circuit, she medalled five times, winning two golds. Early this year, though, she suffered a rib injury, but says it has completely healed. In men’s competition, all hail the king of Canadian bobsledding, Pierre Lueders. This most-decorated slider in the country’s history is heading to his fifth winter Olympics. He took the ceremonial first run at the Whistler Sliding Centre, where Turn 7 is known as Lueders Loop.
The 39-year-old Calgary resident has accumulated 85 World Cup medals and two Olympic medals over the last two decades. A scientific sledder, Lueders analyzes all the lines and curves of practice runs on a computer. In 2010, he might bring a new high-tech, computer-tested sled called the Whistler Bomber.
“From the first day I pushed,” he has said, “I knew I’d found a sport that was for me. There was the experience of speed and danger.”
Luge has not been a strong sport for Canada. But Regan Lauscher, 29, who competed at the Olympic level in 2002 at Salt Lake City and in 2006 at Torino, is a strong contender in the women’s field. She fared poorly last season, sitting out three races while recovering from double shoulder surgery. Two hotshot lugers to watch are Vancouver’s Jeff Christie, 26, who finished last season in 19th place, and Calgary’s Alex Gough, 21, who completed last season rated eighth overall.
Our sliding teams took to the Whistler Sliding Centre for training in October, with the teams to be finalized in late December and mid-January.
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