Published May 2, 2004 12:00AM
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Outside magazine, January 1998
Sport: That’s Gunther to You, Pal
How we can all live out our Olympic fringe-event fantasies By Bill Donahue We remember it warmly, which is a little odd: the wintry joy of zipping through fresh snow on granddad’s toboggan. Powder kissing your face, red scarf waving a long good-bye. Well, brace yourself. A giant multinational company now aims to turn cocoa-fueled backyard sledding into a high-stakes, high-adrenaline endeavor. Witness the 1998 Bell Atlantic Luge Challenge, which will be staged at six northeastern ski areas, including Stratton Mountain and Waterville Valley, beginning this month. For an unabashedly competitive weekend at each of these resorts, the public will be invited to careen down a twisting 400-yard course on a bona fide Laser Luge as Olympic coaches and athletes hover nearby, barking instructions. Riders will be timed on a clock accurate to the thousandth of a second, and slowpokes will be publicly shamed via an electronic scoreboard. “Who knows?” enthuses Bell Atlantic spokesperson Michael Kornfeld, “Maybe one of the competitors will turn out to be a future Olympian.” Or maybe not. The Luge Challenge is, by Olympic standards, a decidedly junior varsity endeavor. Laser Luges are plastic — and hence lighter — than standard steel luges. They only go about 30 miles per hour, as opposed to a professional’s 90, and the courses will be relatively gentle — carved into the snow rather than coated with ice. Still, the best of these weekend heroes will get a rare chance to play Olympian for a day: The winner at each of this winter’s Challenges earns an all-expenses-paid trip to Lake Placid and a slide down the 1980 Olympic luge run on a brand-new contraption called the Luge Rocket. “Basically,” explains Dmitry Feld, spokesman for the U.S. Luge Association, “you lay down in this little capsule, you pray, and then you go.” |