THE SPORT
American Eric Bernotas first tried the sport of skeleton four years ago at
age 30. Now he is a medal contender for Turin.
Fellow American Tristan Gale won the women's gold medal in 2002 at Salt
Lake City after spending only one (unspectacular) season on the World Cup
circuit.
So, who said getting to the Olympic podium was a lifelong journey? But if
you think that the sport of skeleton racing is easy to pick up and gain high
success, think again.
To explain what skeleton racing is all about, you have to visualize
yourself lying on your stomach and speeding down an icy track at speeds of up
to 130 kilometres per hour (80 m.p.h.)! Going around the run's turns, you
sometimes feel pressure equal to 5-G forces.
The steel-framed sled you're lying on (if you are male) weighs as much as
95 pounds while a women's sled checks in at nearly 77 pounds. What is perhaps
most fascinating and frightening is the fact that despite its speed, the
skeleton sled has no steering wheel or brakes!
You'll do all this on a track that is 1,200-1,300 metres long, with
downhill gradients up to 12%. The track also has elements of varying technical
difficulty. Particularly demanding elements in terms of driving technique are
set up in the first stretch that accounts for two-thirds of the track.
To make up for the lack of brakes, competitors can slow down their sleds at
the end of the run with their feet using shoes that have a maximum of eight
spikes on the soles.
Sleds do come equipped with bumpers on the front and rear to absorb shocks
and protect the competitors from the icy walls of the run.
The frames are comprised of steel with specific material percentages and,
in the early days of the sport, bore a vague resemblance to a skeleton, giving
rise to the sport's name. Handles are used primarily for the starting push.
Racers get to wear helmets of hard plastic that are equipped with a chin
guard and visor and a racing suit that is tight-fitting and made of elastic
fabric with padding sewn into the elbow.
Roaming through the library of the International Olympic Committee in
Lausanne, Switzerland, one ascertains that skeleton (sled racing) owes its
origin to St. Moritz, a Swiss winter sport resort for the rich which boasted
its famous Cresta Run. Modern skeleton sliding is an adaptation of cresta,
which itself evolved from traditional tobogganing.
The first run was built by a group of English tourists in 1884 in St.
Moritz in the Cresta Valley - hence the name of both the sport and the run.
The original Cresta Run was a modified toboggan run with curves and tight
corners added to liven things up. It stretched about one kilometre and with a
vertical drop of about 150 metres. By 1885, the first major competition, The
Grand National, was held on the run.
Not surprisingly, skeleton appeared for the first time in the Olympic Games
in 1928 in St. Moritz. Then the sport was promptly dropped from the Games only
to reappear in 1948 when, you guessed it, St. Moritz again hosted the
Olympics. The sport then disappeared for more than 50 years from the Olympic
scene until 2002 at Salt Lake City when you could say that the IOC pulled its
skeleton out of the closet.
The first international women's sanctioned event took place in 1996 with
the first world championship for women occurring in 2000.
QUALIFICATIONS
Skeleton has two Olympic events: Men's and women's singles. Each nation can
enter up to three men and two women and the allowance is predicated on how
each nation does in qualifying events.
The U.S. lost a key competitor in Noelle Pikus-Pace, last year's reigning
world champion, when she suffered a compound fracture of her right leg after
being hit by an American four-man bobsled during a practice run last October
in Calgary, with Turin only 114 days away. Noelle and five other skeleton
competitors were waiting for a truck to pick them up at the finish area and
were unaware the bobsled team was taking a practice run.
Pikus-Pace was the unfortunate victim of the accident and had to be rushed
to a nearby medical centre where a titanium rod was inserted in her leg during
emergency surgery. Doctors told her that her recovery would take up to six
months.
Amazingly, she returned to action in December but could not finish high
enough to qualify on her own. The Americans were unable to enter two women
because they finished ranked fourth in qualification and only the top three
nations got the second entrant allotment.
The skeleton event takes place on one day and involves two runs by each
competitor with the total time determining the winner. The order for the first
run is determined by a draw the day before the event. The top 20 men and top
12 women from the first run advance to the second run and start from slowest
to fastest based on first-run times.
A competitor has 30 seconds to begin his/her race after receiving the audio
and visual signals to start.
Every Canadian competing in Turin is a possibility to win Canada's first
ever skeleton medal.
Jeff Pain, a 35-year-old landscape architect, is the two-time reigning
World Cup champion. Firefighter Duff Gibson, 39, won the 2004 World
Championship event while finishing third last year.
On the women's side, Melissa Hollingsworth-Richards, the 25-year-old wife
of rodeo cowboy Billy Richards, just won her first overall World Cup points
championship while teammate Lindsay Alcock, 28, won the title two years
earlier.
OLYMPIC GOLDS
2002
MEN: Jim Shae (USA)
WOMEN: Tristan Gale (USA)
Did you know?
Canadian Ryan Davenport was a three-time skeleton world champion in the
1990s.
