Mojo

At the moment I’m in Altenberg, Germany. It’s a tiny little town near the east border that actually manages to surpass Konigssee as a true ass-crack town. There is one set of traffic lights here.

I’ve just come from a competition in Konigssee where I placed 21^st out of 69 entrants. That’s a good result and I’m happy with it for a number of reasons.

I took over half a second off my previous best time (that’s huge by the way).

I came close to beating my coach.

I beat my team-mate Patrick.

Following the international training in Torino and after making a few adjustments to my sled I seem to have gotten my mojo back. I’ve begun sliding better and better, much to my relief. I was starting to get worried there. Big thanks to everyone who had faith in me and took the time to tell me so. Every little helps when you’re doing your best and it’s still not working.

Over the years I've been doing skeleton I've gathered the impression that people think there's not much to it once you've done the push and loaded onto the sled. You just lie there like a brave sack of potatoes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a lot of work to be done over the next 50 seconds. I'd say the sport is about 10% push and 90% driving. Sure, the push is helpful but it's no good to you if you can't drive. There's a Russian slider on the World Cup circuit at the moment. I can't remember his name right now but he is a seriously fast pusher. He holds the push record of nearly every track he's been to. But not the downtime records, and that's because he can't drive. By the time he gets to the bottom of the track he has lost so much time from bumps and skids that his awesome start is utterly wasted.

On the other hand look at someone like my coach, Clifton Wrottesley (Lord). He came fourth in the last Winter Olympics. He is an amazingly good driver and a not-so-amazing starter. If you have a slow start you can make up for it somewhat by being a good driver. During the course of his 2nd run in the Games, Clifton went from being 11th to 4th by driving the sled so well.

On most tracks, if you get on the sled and lie there like the aforementioned sack of potatoes you will probably make it down without too much trouble. You'll get bumped a bit, but you won't get seriously hurt, and you certainly won't get a fast time.

The sled you ride is about 70 cm wide, enough to accommodate your shoulders and a bit more for protection. The track varies in width from 1m to 5m. There's plenty of room and a huge huge number of lines you can take while going down the track. Some are easier to do, some end up hurting you, and some are definitely faster than others. What differentiates them all? Steering. You decide where the sled goes in the track.

If it were like driving a car it would be easy: “Oh, I want to go left here, I’ll just turn the wheel and it’s done “. Not so on a sled, and this is what makes it such a great sport. It’s not just the ability to swallow your fear and go head first at 80mph, it’s not just your athletic ability to do a fast push start. It’s also your ability to drive a sled that is difficult to drive. You need to have a complete awareness of where you are in a corner, what pressures you’re experiencing, whether the sled is rising or falling or skidding. And if you need to make adjustments they have to be done for fractions of a second at just the right moment.

But that’s not the hardest part. The hardest part is doing as little steering as possible. Steering is basically braking. The more steering you do, the more braking you do, the more speed you lose, never to be regained. That balance between doing too little and too much is a fine one.

When it all comes together it’s an amazing feeling that is difficult to describe. I’ve regained some of that feeling. It may sound stereotypical but it’s almost as if you are one with your sled, and not just because there are huge G forces pushing you onto it. When you pick up a glass of water you just do it. You don’t think about the individual movements involved like extending your arm, opening your hand, moving it around the glass, closing your hand. The nitty gritty details are taken care of on a deeper level that doesn’t register.