Surviving the ride
Publisher explores midlife in a speeding bobsled
By PAM MORRIS
Idaho Mountain Express Publisher
It
started with a phone number for the Utah Winter Sports Center in Park City. Three weeks
later, I and 35 fellow adventurers were sitting in a second-floor room of the day lodge at
the facility that will host the 2002 Olympics competition in luge, bobsled and ski
jumping.
I was there to ride in a four-person bobsled down the newest and
fastest track in the world.
When I arrived at the hotel the night before, I told the desk clerk
that I was there to ride the bobsled. She looked to be about 20 years my junior. She said,
"Ooohhhh, I don’t think I want to do that."
As the bellman pushed the luggage cart down the hall, I told him, too.
"Phewww," he exhaled, and shuddered.
He said he had done it. He said riding the bobsled was the only thing
that was as big a thrill as halo diving—parachuting from 25,000 feet--he’d done
in the military.
Call it midlife crisis. Call it mad. I was still excited. I’d
watched the Olympics on television since I was a kid, and I wanted to ride the bobsled.
The depth of the madness began to dawn in an orientation session. We
watched video taken by a camera that had been strapped on the front of a bobsled.
We saw the track as it whizzed by. On a second run, the camera was
turned to face the driver. As the sled barreled down the track, the driver’s helmeted
head whipped around like a puppet in a wind storm, and he counted aloud as he cornered
through the 15 curves in the track.
The video segued into race vignettes in which bobsleds flipped and
passengers ended up sliding down the track on their helmets. One sled took off and left
most of its team at the start as they looked on aghast.
Our group laughed nervously.
The video finished with clips from the earliest bobsled races ever
filmed in which bobsleds flew off a track and landed in trees.
Bobsled tracks have improved a lot since then. Utah spent $25 million
building and engineering the approximately three-quarter-mile-long track that is frozen
with 60 miles of refrigeration pipe.
Besides, I had already signed my life away in the fine print and $125
had been charged to my credit card.
Professional drivers and brakemen at the Utah track have piloted 17,482
sleds down the track since it opened in January 1997. Speeds over 80 mph are common.
There’s never been a serious injury.
Coaching us-who-would-be-ballast was simple. A trainer told us,
"Shrug your shoulders and get them as close to your ears as possible. That way, your
bobbing head will be cushioned between your shoulders instead of bouncing uncontrollably
from side to side.
"Grab the handles in the sled. Keep your body stiff.
"Don’t let your head drop back because it will be pasted
there and you won’t be able to get it back up. If you drop your head against the
brakeman’s helmet, he won’t like it and he’ll head butt you to get you
forward.
"Have a nice ride. Any questions?"
"How do we avoid the upside-down ride?" I asked.
"That’s what your driver is for," came the answer.
Just as in the Olympics, 18 sled positions were drawn from a hat. My
number came up—No. 1. My stomach flipped over.
Orientation
was over. We left to meet the vans that would drive us 400 feet uphill to the start. I met
my partner Wayne, a retired government worker from California. He had decided to begin his
adventures as a retired person by riding the bobsled. He said he had two bad knees.
In the van, we met Dick, a Salt Lake pediatric nephrologist at the
University of Utah Medical Center, and his brother, a retired school administrator from
San Francisco.
Dick had become part of a local luge club at Park City after he
attended a luge seminar. He is just one of many local people taking advantage of the close
proximity of the sports park and the training that’s available to people of all ages,
not just Olympic athletes.
At the start, heavily muscled drivers and brakemen waited. We lined up
in order of descent. The 13-foot-long sleds were star-spangled red, white and blue. Just
one was red. Wayne and I chose that one.
Someone handed me a helmet. Bundled into it, sounds became muddled. I
was the shortest, so I took the second seat, Wayne the third.
"Seat" is an exaggeration. A simple leather saddle between
sledders keeps them from sliding into one another. As Wayne stretched his legs in front of
him and wedged his tennis shoes under my knees, he winced.
I closed the visor of my helmet. The driver hopped into the sled in
front of me. With each hand, he grabbed the D-rings on ropes connected to the
bobsled’s runners. That’s how he would guide what would soon become a speeding
missile.
With all of us squashed together, movement inside the sled really
wasn’t an option.
The brakeman gave a push, joined us in the sled, and we began a gentle
slide. My shoulders shrugged, my spine stiffened.
The challenge for bobsledders is to learn to see, think and feel as
they hurtle ahead at what seems like unfathomable speed.
The roar and the rumble of the sled engulfed me as we gained speed.
With each curve, my head bobbed between my shoulders. I struggled to see and to think.
The temperature that day was 43 degrees and sunscreens covered much of
the track to keep it from melting. As our red missile roared, I looked up and saw
screen-screen-screen-blue sky-screen-screen-screen as the white sides of the track whizzed
by in my peripheral vision.
I desperately clutched the handles with my fingertips—the rest of
my hand wouldn’t fit around them. Halfway down, my shoulders insisted that an NFL
lineman had hitched a piggyback ride. Three-quarters of the way down, my mind screamed,
"What the hell are you doing here?"
I didn’t know at the time that the sled and my body were
completely perpendicular to the earth, pressed by five G’s (five times the
acceleration caused by gravity) into a monster curve. The driver’s helmet in front of
me looked like it was straight up, and my brain told me I was too. My brain was wrong.
The bobsled hit 77.5 mph.
I didn’t know until I stood an arm’s length from the track
and watched other sleds hurtle by that all anyone could see of us at that point was the
tops of our helmets.
The run was over in 54.48 seconds. Electronic devices recorded and
displayed our time and speed on a scoreboard.
The bobsled began to slow as the track curved uphill and the brakeman
cranked to bring it to a stop.
Everyone hopped out of the sled—except me. My knees felt like
Jello. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I needed help. Somehow, I climbed
out on my own. Wayne and I hugged one another as though we had been lifelong friends. We
hugged our driver, our brakeman. We whooped! We hollered—yeah!
I have a polaroid photograph, a card in which our time was recorded,
and the autographs of our driver and brakeman—the men who saved my life. And, I have
the memory of a lifetime.
Even so, I came away a little jealous. They got six runs that day, and
I got only one.
