Our lugers have become winners
Canadian squad came to the fore when the athlete became more important than the sled
Luge, in its most basic form, is a lot like a toboggan run: hop on a sled, feet first, and get to the bottom of the hill before everyone else.
But the high-performance version of the sport, with its $10,000 handmade sleds, refrigerated tracks and speeds clocking more than 140 kilometres per hour, has left that hill in the park far behind.
For decades, the technological advantage that could be gained through better and faster sleds was often the key factor in determining who could step on the podium. Now, that’s starting to change and that’s a very good thing for Canada, which has never had the massive budget for sled development that some European nations have.
“There is no end to technology changes but it’s all tweaks and twerks, the way you set up sleds and adjust them, small details,” Canada’s head coach, Wolfgang Staudinger, said. “The biggest change is the athletes’ composition — it’s getting a lot more athletic.”
And Canada has a dedicated group of sliders willing to work hard. Top women Alex Gough and Kimberley McRae, male slider Sam Edney and the doubles team of Tristan Walker and Justin Snith combined to produce, heartbreakingly, three fourths and a fifth-place finish at the 2014 Sochi Games.
Six months before the start of this winter’s World Cup races, Canada’s sliders were sitting on modified sleds dragging themselves, by their fingertips, up and down the lanes of an indoor track. They were paddling, as it’s called when they use their arms to propel their sleds, and thinking about that extra step to the podium at February’s Olympics.
It looks weird and they’re used to quizzical looks from people wander- ing by the CSI Calgary gym at Canada Olympic Park where they train. It’s also hard, very hard. It has to be.
The racers launch themselves forward with a pull on the start handles and, wearing gloves with metal-spiked fingertips, they paddle the ice for a few metres to gain more speed. A fast start is critical. In the sliding sports of luge, skeleton and bobsled, a fraction of a second advantage at the start, assuming no steering mistakes, multiplies by the bottom. And fractions of a second are huge.
At last month’s season-opening World Cup in Austria, for example, first place and 10th in the men’s event were separated by 0.32 seconds. And Gough missed the podium in the women’s event by 0.041 seconds.
That amount of time can’t be imagined or felt but it determines success or failure for lugers.
At the 2014 Olympics, athletic speed in the start and skill sliding down the track comprised about half the overall rider-sled package, Staudinger said. The other half was the quality of equipment and its setup. Now, leading into the 2018 Olympics, he figures the athlete portion has grown to about 60 per cent of the winning package.
“Internationally, the athletes themselves are all much better, technically much better. Start times are better and there are more people that can do athletically well,” said Staudinger, who won Olympic bronze in doubles luge for Germany at the 1988 Games.
Natalie Geisenberger, Germany’s Olympic champion, is six feet tall and 170 pounds and typifies what has long been considered the ideal body type. But, lately, there’s been a much broader range of athletes who have found success in luge, including American, Canadian and Swiss sliders who are much shorter and start tipping the scales at just 130 pounds.
It’s a complicated set of criteria to determine the ideal body type, and there’s little agreement on what matters most. An athlete needs to be strong enough to pull a fast start, heavy enough to get the most advan- tage in this gravity-based sport and slim enough to be as aerodynamic as possible on the sled.
But Staudinger thinks the near perfect body type for luge wears Canadian colours.
“Kim McRae, with 10 kilos (22 pounds) more and three or four hundredths (of a second) faster on the start because she doesn’t have to carry a weight vest. She has the perfect body shape — just a bit on the light side.”
That’s why McRae often takes her five-foot-seven frame to the gym for extra weightlifting. Building muscle is a slow process for her and the days of putting on any kind of weight are long over.
“It would be nice if you could get the advantage by cake,” Staudinger said, chuckling. “In the old, old days that’s what basically happened. They ate sausages and got big and heavy because athletics didn’t play a role — it was gravity driven. But those times are over, this is really decided on the (starting) blocks, it’s like sprinting.”
McRae was just a kid when she stumbled on this niche sport at a Calgary ski show and signed up for a luge camp.
“I loved it from the first time going down the track, absolutely loved it,” she said. “You’re almost flying but you’re not; you’re out of control but in control. It was nothing like I’d ever experienced before and I was 11 . . . ‘This is so cool, I can go 60 kilometres an hour without even knowing it.’ ”
Now, at 25, she races down the track at more than double that speed. She won bronze at the world championships in Austria in January and she was fifth at the last Olympics. But, as accomplished as she is, McRae is still working to catch up to her own teammate.
Gough finished fourth at the 2014 Games and, years before that, became the first North American woman to consistently challenge, and sometimes beat, the dominant Germans. Heading into Saturday’s World Cup women’s race in Lake Placid, Gough is ranked third overall.
She used to joke that she had to work harder than others because her parents, who had the foresight to put her in luge when she was 13, didn’t give her height or “monkey arms” to help with fast starts. But now, at 30, she doesn’t think much about that.
“I’m a little short but our sport has funny trends of where it goes in terms of body types, especially on the women’s side. There was a trend towards taller, bigger women and now we’ve seen a lot of success from smaller, almost petite women,” Gough said earlier this year. “I feel stronger and fitter . . . every year I get better.”
The Canadians struggled to translate their fitness into results early this season, missing the podium at the first three World Cup events. Gough was awfully close, coming fourth twice. Things came together last weekend in Calgary things came together, when the team produced three silver medals and two fourthplace finishes.
Gough won silver with McRae coming fourth in the women’s race; Edney won silver with teammate Mitchel Malyk coming fourth in the men’s race; and the doubles team of Snith and Walker joined Gough and Edney to win silver in the team relay.
“Our starts were competitive and sliding was very good on our home track,” Staudinger said.
The key now will be keeping those competitive starts, especially when they head to less familiar tracks in Europe for the January World Cups that will determine the seeded group of athletes who will get the best start numbers at the Olympics.
And that’s when the Canadians will find out if the work they put in the gym from April to August was enough.
“A lot of athletes start the season very strong and by Christmas they die simply because, during the summer preparation, they didn’t do their homework to put in a good base to last from October to the end of February,” Staudinger said. “That’s where the athletics really come in.”