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Me Olympian! Sort of.
Stricken with Olympic fever? Can’t make it to British Columbia?
You can still get your five-ring fix.
By Lisa Gregoire with photography by Nancie Battaglia
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I'M STANDING beside the luge and bobsled run in Lake Placid, N.Y., wearing a wool toque inside a motorcycle
helmet. American Olympic luge silver medallist Gordy Sheer is giving me pertinent instructions, but all I hear is:
“If thad hammens mollofumm an then laabommollo ann you'll be vine.”
He smiles. I smile.
“Juth rememmer never mmiffilu your nmododol, OK?” I nod, a bobble-head, distracted by the frozen tube of death at
my elbow and the periodic ssssshhhhheeewwwww from some teenage cyclone zipping past high on the wall at 100 kilometres
an hour. These dauntless future medallists start at the top of the hill, the show-offs. I'll be tenderly deposited onto
the track two-thirds of the way down.
Sheer and his colleagues tell me skeleton (on your stomach, head first) is easier for a neophyte than luge (on your back, feet first), which offers as much
comfort as saying drowning is more pleasant than decapitation. I hear the track
announcer introduce me over the PA system to warn athletes at the top to sit tight
while a writer in hiking boots makes like a sack of potatoes down Mount Van
Hoevenberg. I sign the waiver, lay my soft body on a metre of steel, inhale the
cool moisture of the ice, inches from my nose, and repeat to myself, “deep breath,
don't throw up.”
Sheer gently nudges me from the safety of my horizontal nest like a baby robin and, within seconds, my body is a
short, stout torpedo, head thrust vulnerably forward, arms pinned at my side. Moments later, I’m flung to the wall like
a roulette ball around the track’s heart-shaped
finale and screaming like David Lee Roth in “Runnin’ with the Devil.” Which is oddly appropriate.
I stop panting and inhale deeply, panic transforming into giddy exhilaration. Hell, I could get used to th.. Poof. It’s over. I
crawl out of the icy half-pipe before my body has fully reassembled its cells. It lasted 39 seconds and I topped 74 kilometres
an hour. I gird gelatinous limbs and yell “Woo-hoo,” to amused staff. “How hard can luge be?” I practically snicker.
Hubris, considered an affront to the gods, was a sin in ancient Greece, and rightfully so. But first things first.
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