Ow

Don't worry, that's not my leg there. I'm only illustrating a point cos photos of my bruises don't look cool enough.

I've just finished training on the new Olympic Track here in Italy.
It's been a very intense week. It started with a loooong drive.
Our rental car, while very nice, didn't have any winter tyres on it. Apparently we wouldn't need them until end of December at least. About one week later, when it started snowing about 3 feet a day, we decided to get winter tyres.

Actually, I can be a bit more acurate than that. We decided to get winter tyres one day after an evening training session.
Driving back down the track was ... interesting. Near the top of the track there are these big curves called S-bends. They're very big, and very open, no short wall needed to keep you in while the corner is flinging you up. Proceeding at about 2 miles an hour was going great until the car decided to head straight for the entrance to bend 2. While my disdain for Luge sliders is great, it doesn't extend to running them over while they are only 12 years old and innocently training on some German track in the middle of nowhere. Frantic wheel turning, pumping the brakes and soiling ourselves resulted in a less murderous course and a detour to Munich to get winter tyres.

On the way we discovered a few interesting things:

Firstly, rental companies can be quite nice sometimes, especially when they replace you're admittedly decent Peugeot 406 with a kick ass Audi A4 so you can have winter tyres.

Secondly, Konigssee to Torino via Munich is a hell of a long drive. About 12 hours in fact. I would heartily recommend the private jet alternative if you can. They don't need winter tyres for a start.

Thirdly, we came up with something we like to call Bahn-Casting. Our training group currently consists of three athletes. Patrick and myself representing Ireland, and Tyler Botha waving the South African Flag. Pat & I share one car and Tyler has his own. He also has an iPod with some rather cool tunes on it and an iTrip which basically broadcasts whatever the iPod is playing to a particular radio frequency so you can tune your car radio in on it and listen to it that way. We found that the iTrip has a range of about 30 meters, which means it's signal can be picked up while in another car. Now, driving within 30 meters of another car at 100mph may sound a bit silly, and it is, but Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix) is so good it must be shared. And who said the 30 meters couldn't be side by side?

We eventually arrived in Torino and proceeded to go about learning this new track that will be hosting the Olympics. I always think that learning a new track is the most involved and consuming aspects of skeleton. When you're in school and you have to learn something, like the method for finding the roots of an equation, you learn it because you're told to. You learn it because it will get you more points in the exams, in turn getting you a better university course and eventually earning you more money, making you a better little capitalist. That kind of abstraction isn't very motivational. Skeleton, on the other hand, is much more concrete. If you learn the track you will be fast, win competitions, get to the Olympics and girls will find you attractive. If you don't learn the track you will get seven shades of crap knocked out of you when you go down it. QED.

The learning process start with the sequence of turns. Before you even go down the track you must know if the next corner is a left or a right. Sounds simple but it's easy to reel off a sequence when sitting comfortably in a chair, not so easy when you're doing it for real. I like to break the track down into sections. All tracks have few key features that you can use to mark where you are. A big long straight, or a particular type of corner, something you can use to reset your place in the track. After a few runs you get to know the individuality of each corner and how it behaves. Like a home that is strange the first time you're in it, and eventually becomes familiar over the days, weeks and months you spend there.

Now it gets a bit more tricky. Next is the detail of what each corner does and it's relationship with the preceding and following corner. When you enter a corner it changes the direction you are travelling in. You've all been in a car when it changes direction. The faster the change of direction, the more you get pulled to the side. In skeleton this pulling is called pressure. When you get pressure in a corner the sled tends to rise and this leads to a few problems. The main one is that it changes the direction of the sled. Instead of a going straight through a corner, you end up being directed towards the roof or inside wall. Sometimes instead of just one pressure you get two, but that's not as tricky as one and a half pressures. Those can leave you high on the wall as the corner is ending and drop you on your side or flip you over.

The general principle is to steer down when you enter a corner. This flattens the wave, keeps you going straight enough and avoids big scary oscillations. The trade off is that steering is basically braking. This is a disgraceful oversimplification of things but I'm going to keep an explanation of steering to another post.

Anyway, the idea is to control the waves in such a way that each corner sets you up nicely for the next, smoothly and cleanly accelerating all the way down the track.

The Torino track is quite challenging. You need to concentrate 110% all the way down, and it's full of corners that are followed by turns going the same direction. They're quite tricky to get right, but that's for another post too. The main issue with the Torino track is bend 18. It's the second last corner, so you're going

quite fast, about 70mph. It also turns quite sharply so you get good pressure in it. Remember, pressure generally equals height. This is a one and a half pressure

corner. The problem with 18 is that there is a bit of roof coming down quite quickly towards the end of the corner, right about when you're coming up to meet it on the crest of the 2nd bit of pressure. In the space of the week we were at International Training there were a heap of nasty crashes. Some of the Italians, on their home track I hasten to add, suffered broken legs, hips and arms. Others were getting concussions, bruised rubs and general bruises. Last year, the first person to do Luge down the track was put in intensive care by 18 for a few days.

For the first few days here I was getting through 18 great. I'd enter the corner nicely, work with the pressures and get out safely and quickly. In a mean way I found it kind of amusing to see the vaunted Americans crashing out of it. They're usually so smooth, fast and un-ruffled. Don't misunderstand me, I know most of these guys at least to nod to and they're all super-nice people. Maybe it's an Irish thing but there's something obscenely satisfying to see that the best skeleton sliders in the world are human and make mistakes too.

Pride comes before a fall.

I failed to notice that the Americans were doing the upper part of the track really well and so were carrying huge speed into the bottom of the track. This changes all the pressures, the timing of steers gets shorter, it's just more difficult. Then one day I got the top part of the track right.
Everything came together, everything was quiet, smooth and accelerating all the way. I clocked over 74mph heading into corner 17. I was in 18 before I knew it, mistimed my steers. I had just
enough time to say "Wha.." and clench my teeth as I flew off the end of 18 onto my side. Vision dims as 19 scoops me back onto my sled off the ice. My ears ring with the huge hit my head's taken off the floor and my shoulder is strangely quiet as it tries to come to terms with what I just did to it.
That ice may look smooth but it is certainly not when felt through a tshirt and a speed suit at 70mph. A quick self assesment while I trundled up the outrun reassured me I hadn't broken anything, or bitten off anything else. Fortunately I was wearing armour pads on my triceps although the top of my shoulder took a nice scrape. I hit hard enough to push the left side of my saddle out by an inch or two and my left shin has picked up a few nice bruises.

You might think I'd be a bit miffed, but I'm not. I didn't break any bones, my saddle can be knocked back fairly easily and I took over a second off my previous best time in the process.

Yes, we are all completely nuts.

The Story So Far

Well after nearly a month of being too busy and being deprived of proper internet access I’ve finally gotten around to another post. To bring you up to speed, I finished up in Lake Placid and flew from Boston to London and on to Munich. That trip was a bit of an ordeal. In Boston the airline company, I won’t mention any names (coughAmericanAirlinescough), refused to take our sleds cos they were too heavy. The next half hour consisted of a combination of begging, pleading, reasoning and thinly veiled threats finally resulting in them graciously taking the sleds along with a generous overweight baggage fee.

Then we finally arrived in Munich we discovered that British Airways felt we didn’t really need anything as cumbersome as our luggage. It had been left in London. A three hour wait for the next flight made everything ok and we were on our way to Igls, Austria for the next stage of the Olympic journey.

Igls is a nice place. It’s just outside of Innsbruck and also where I first started Skeleton. The track there is easy enough to do safely but challenging to get fast times on. We were there to do some training and a Europa Cup competition, which is basically the European equivalent of the America’s Cup.

To cut a long, absent post short we slid well, got some good competition results and had a great time hanging out with a bunch of the American sliders who adopted us as their Lucky Charms. Everyone loves Irish people, it’s great. Now, if only I actually liked Guinness, I’d feel like less of a traitor.

Anyway, after Igls I headed over to Konigssee, Germany for some more training. Konigssee is a pretty little town in the ass-crack of nowhere. In an effort to maintain it’s status as an ass-crack town, Konigssee refuses to offer any reasonable form of internet access. By reasonable I mean other than an internet café that opens only when you don’t need it and fails to work properly when you manage to catch unaware and open. The other alternative is to drive around with my laptop on the seat beside me scanning for unencrypted access points, pulling over when I get one, connecting to it and hoping they don’t look out their window and call the police. I don’t like doing that, hence my prolonged blog absence.

One of the things I enjoy most about skeleton is the surroundings of the tracks. They are all usually located in places where land is cheap and steep, which means mountainous areas and few houses around to spoil the scenery. Here’s the view I usually warm up to in Konigssee.

The track in Konigsse is also Very Important. Again, note the capital letters. This is the track that I need to be damn good on in order to qualify for the Olympic Games. I’ve been down this track more times than I care to remember, I’m usually quite good at it, which makes me confident that I can qualify for the Games.

Except for one thing…. I’m not driving that well on it at the moment. What’s worse, in a way, is that my team-mate Patrick has suddenly started sliding very well on this track. Better than me. On one level I’m happy for him, I’m not such a bad person that I can’t feel happy for someone when they do well.
On a darker, more private level, I’m furious. Not with him, but with myself for not being better, like I usually am. This whole thing would be great material for some film where our hero’s fate is undecided, even though we know, deep down, that it will all work out ok in the end. Will Karate Kid be able to win the tournament? We’re not too sure, it doesn’t look good, the cards are down, he’s hurt his leg. Except, this isn’t a film. The ending doesn’t have to be a happy one … it could be a Quentin Tarantino film. If I don’t slide better than I am, I won’t be going to the Games.

But don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still time to improve, find that extra gear, squeeze that last bit of speed out of the corner. In the meantime there’s plenty of fun to be had. At the moment I’m in Sestriere, Italy preparing to do some training on the new Olympic Track. If I qualify, this is the one you will be seeing me on in three months. This track is Very Important Too. I’ll let you know how I get on.