Fact is nobody expected that the United States Olympic team would be able to top their historic 37 medal performance in Vancouver 4 years ago. Nobody could or would even dream of predicting that this depleted US team would win with the dominance and ease that they did in those Olympics.
Those people were smart for as we now sit over 1 week into the games the United States has won just 4 gold’s, 4 silver medals and a consolation prize of 8 bronze medals. As we delve deeper, the Olympic medal table reveals that of the 166 medals handed out to winners in 13 sub categories of events only snowboarding has been on dominated by the Americans as 3 of their 4 gold medals in these games have been one by American Snowboards. But what has taken many by surprise in these games is a subtle proficiency by American athletes in a branch of sports that normally confined to the NBC late night broadcast slot and is rarely cast a second look by viewers.
That subcategory is sliding and includes the sports of Luge, Skeleton and Bobsleigh.
Already, the United States has won 3 medals at the home of sliding in Sochi, the Sanki Sliding center all before any winners in the bobsleigh competition have been named. With one silver and one bronze medal won in Skeleton and 1 bronze medal won last night in the Luge competition, the United States is moving into uncharted waters as coming into Sochi 2014 they had not won a medal in luge or Skeleton since Salt Lake City 2002 .
Even for those who do not know anything about these sports, the sheer fact that in one games, the United States had doubled their combined Luge/Skeleton medal count from Nagano, 1998 to Vancouver 2010 must be impressive.
But nevertheless, knowing a little about the Luge/Skeleton aspect of sliding only further explains the sense of accomplishment this American team must be feeling right now.
Fact is the entire sliding story begins from the same place around the same point in time. Though the idea of sledding as both a means of entertainment and also travel across the snow laden hills of northern Europe is said to have originated back in the 1400's, it was in a small Swiss town called St Moritz that people first started sliding competitively. At that time the idea of a highly competitive winter games like the modern day Olympics had begun to sweep the modernized world while many adrenaline junkies began to realize how fun it was to jump on top of something that would propel you to speeds then rarely even achieved in a car. A man named Caspar Badrutt quickly recognized this and originally used old delivery sleds he found in trash cans in St Moritz to provide those reckless tourists with one huge reason to book stays at his hotel.
Though that initially caused problems when his guests would collide with pedestrians in the streets, the occasional broken limb or aggravated group of passers by gathering in Badrutt's lobby meant nothing to him when he soon realized how much money this new, commercialized sledding, was bringing in. By the mid 1920's arrived, Switzerland had gone into full sliding mode. When the games finally came to St Moritz in 1928 though neither luge nor skeleton was included in the schedule, bobsleigh and a now defunct form of sliding called toboggan were and so that sledding crazed host nation of Switzerland put great emphasis on how they performed in the sports first real test.
Though sliding was torn from the games 4 years later and then the games altogether were cancelled as World War II ripped through the planet, the success of bobsled in 1928 was remembered 20 years later when once again St Moritz was penciled in as host.
In those Olympics, bobsled was retained while the much slower, toboggan was dropped to make room for Skeleton which involved a racer diving headfirst onto the sled and steering it with his or her feet. While bobsled remained heavily dominated by the Swiss, the Skeleton competition that year signaled a grand expansion of competitive sledding across Europe as for the first time in the sports history, the competition involved riders from countries other than Switzerland. Those Skeleton races were cumulatively won by Nino Bibbia and finished with riders from 4 different nations penciled in as top 10 sliders.
For the United States and Canada however, it would not be until the 1980 games in Lake Placid that they would begin to take a real interest in anything to do with sliding. And even then they never managed to succeed on the track. But regardless, from those games on the entire world was all in on sliding.
From 1980 on, luge was all the rage as in every games since, long, twisting, steeply banked ice tracks have been a snaking constant throughout every host city and no matter what, their icy white bodies have been the speed charged venues for this annoyingly simple but small detail oriented sport of sliding.
In 2014, almost 100 years after sliding became a real sport, competitions like luge, skeleton or bobsled are sports of subtle strategy. While in the 70's winners would win by 2 or 3 seconds, now the winners win by 10th's and 100th's of a second and that is truly unfathomable. In these games, one mistake means the race is over, one little nick of the wall, one break of the aerodynamic form dashes your hopes and forces you to wait 4 more years before your next chance.
But at the same time, luge, skeleton or bobsled are simple sports that are easy to master. You see stories like that of Olympic hurdler, Lolo Jones who managed to become a bobsled pusher in just the 2 year break between London and Sochi or those of Alex Demchenko who at 42 years old has competed in more Olympics than anyone else in history and even now is still going strong as he was won 2 silver medals already in Sochi.
Sliding is unique. It relies on humans who shoot down a lethal ice track at 70 miles per hour and win races by hundredths or even thousandths of a second and know that 1 mistake ends their race immediately. In something as simple as sledding, with as simple a goal as "get on the sled and follow the track", these sports are a kind that is very rare in the modern competitive scene and even more rare in that of the United States. We can master, soccer, dominate basketball and yet it has taken 100 years to master the art of laying down and getting from point A to point B really, really fast.
But now there is a future. Operating off of their long awaited sliding success in Sochi, this American team has opened the door to their successor, digging the groves in these sliding surfaces and paving the way for the United States to take over yet another global sport.
The empire is growing.
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