Technology and safety are clashing in sliding sports, where sleds made for speed are finding tracks built to slow them down.
Yanqing, China - U.S.A. Luge has partnered with Ferrari to use their mechanical and aeronautical engineering professors to improve their sleds. Italy's bobsled and skeleton teams have been working with Ferrari for a long time, and new Chinese bobsleds are incorporating rocket technology into their designs.
The expanding incorporation of technology into sliding sports is happening with one overarching goal: making sleds faster. Virtually every country with aspirations of winning Olympic medals at this month’s Beijing Olympics in bobsled, skeleton and luge is now aligned with a racecar designer, aeronautics expert or rocket scientist. This is being done in an effort to make sleds go faster and hopefully win more medals.
They will chase those medals at China’s Yanqing National Sliding Center, where the track’s 16 winding curves are designed to resemble a dragon. Three uphill sections, including a 360-degree turn, were constructed with one overarching goal: slowing the sleds down.
"All teams are aiming to get faster and that's the name of the game," said Dwight Bell, the general secretary of the International Luge Federation, the sport's global governing body. "But you don't want the sled speeds to exceed what the track has been designed for."
The tension of those competing interests comes as luge, bobsled and skeleton are still in the beginning stages of understanding the long-term effects of athletes hurling themselves down icy chutes at blistering speeds.
A growing number of bobsled and skeleton athletes have reported chronic conditions like headaches and fogginess in recent years. This is most often associated with contact sports like football, ice hockey and boxing. Three North American bobsledders have died by suicide since 2013, including Pavle Jovanovic, a member of the United States bobsled team at the 2006 Olympics, who died in 2020 at age 43.
"That's a fundamental conflict in the sport," said Aliyah Snyder, a neuropsychologist at U.C.L.A. who is working to develop safety protocols in sliding sports. "The emphasis has always been on going faster. But the fallout of that is there are limits."
In 2021, researchers concluded that Jovanovic had developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. This is a degenerative brain disease found in athletes and others who have sustained repeated hits to the head. He is believed to be the first athlete in a sliding sport to be found with C.T.E.
Luge athletes experience some of the same forces as competitors in bobsled and skeleton. They race feet first and are equipped with a support strap that can reduce head trauma. Luge often produces the highest speeds in sliding sports, and in 2010 Nodar Kumaritashvili, a 21-year-old luge athlete from Georgia, died during a training accident before the Vancouver Olympics.
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Though the potential consequences can be an afterthought amid the racers' quest for speed, adrenaline and victory, they should not be.
An American luger and two-time Olympian, Jayson Terdiman, 33, has jumped from a plane. For him, luge provides much more of a thrill than jumping from a plane.
"They feed you that addiction very slowly to hook you," said Terdiman, who recently retired after not qualifying for the Games. "And then, by the time you're old enough to realize that what you're doing has consequences, it's too late. You're already fully in love with that feeling and that rush."
Snyder, a former skeleton athlete for Israel’s national team, experienced both the rush and the consequences. She said she sustained five or six concussions before a doctor told her to choose between the sport and her brain. But crashes, Snyder said, are just part of the concern: The cumulative effects of rattling vibrations felt on the rides may be just as important.
She has joined Peter McCarthy, a neurophysiologist at the University of South Wales; Christina Smith, a retired Canadian Olympic bobsledder; and Mark Wood, a longtime skeleton coach, in an effort to make the sport safer. They developed a survey involving concussion and injury histories that they hope to soon disseminate to prominent sliding athletes, but they haven’t yet received cooperation from governing bodies.
Smith has dealt with a variety of issues since she retired from competition in 2004, including depression, anxiety, and memory loss. She has taken her symptoms seriously since the death of Adam Wood, a Canadian bobsledder who died by suicide in 2013. An examination revealed damage to her brain.
“I believe that this is the hidden pandemic, the brain injuries in sports,” Smith said.
Many athletes, scientists, and former athletes agree that one problem with sliding-sports athletes is that they often risk their own financial security to bankroll their Olympic dreams. As a result, there is little incentive for them to self-report injuries — and remove themselves from valuable training time or competitions. One symptom of concussions, those experts noted, is the reduction of choice-making ability, a lesson Snyder said she learned from her own experiences in skeleton.
Amy Williams, 39, won a gold medal in women's skeleton at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. She recalled being taken aback by the track's speed and pushing to the back of her mind the tragedy that had occurred only days before it was her turn to compete.
Williams said that you need to find the speed at which you are in control, but also push your limits to find where those limits are. Being fast can result in crashing, so it is important to find the right balance.
Williams retired after the Vancouver Games. In the years since, she has undergone four major knee operations, she said. Williams also suffers from constant headaches and sharp pain down her legs.
Williams said that the pain in her life is quite regular, unfortunately, in skeleton.
Designers of the Olympic track in Sochi, Russia, created three uphill sections in 2014 that reduced speeds by about 10 m.p.h. from the ones recorded at the track in Vancouver, British Columbia.
At the Yanqing National Sliding Center, the speeds may be even more tempered. The track’s defining feature is the Kreisel, a large circular curve in the middle of the track where Americans reported losing speed during training sessions.
“The Kreisel is actually pretty difficult to find speed through,” said Chris Mazdzer, who earned a silver medal in men’s luge at the 2018 Winter Olympics. It can be tough to find speed on the Kreisel track, even for the best lugers.
In Beijing, Mazdzer will compete on a sled that the National Science Foundation helped finance. Gone are the days when Mazdzer would sand down and shape his own sled.
The foundation awarded a grant to U.S.A. Luge, which partnered with Doug Bohl and Brian Helenbrook, mechanical and aeronautical engineering professors at Clarkson University, and Colby Mazzuca, who runs a computational fluid dynamics company.
Any speed gained through technological breakthroughs will likely be microscopic in a sport timed to fractions of a second. The group sought those infinitesimal acquisitions by testing shapes on computer models to arrive at an ideal one to reduce drag on sleds. They are looking for any speed increase no matter how small it may be.
Bohl has worked with U.S.A. Luge for more than a decade. His son, Bailey, showed interest in the sport and Bohl followed, becoming the president of the Adirondack Luge Club. It didn’t take long for him to wonder how he could improve a shed’s shape given his background in engineering.
"A slider on a sled is already streamlined from an aerodynamic perspective," Bohl said. "But you want to shape the air as it's coming off the back of the sled, so that it comes off the slider and the sled smoothly."
Now Bohl is part of the global hunt for speed. Each country’s research is confidential. McLaren Applied Technologies works with the British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association. BMW partnered with Germany’s teams.
Many of the sport’s older tracks are still in circulation, but nearly all of the world’s newer facilities are aimed at limiting how fast athletes can go.
"Athletes will always want to be faster and improve themselves because that is the nature of what we are and do," said Shelley Rudman, 40, who won a silver medal for Britain in women's skeleton at the 2006 Winter Olympics. "It is also right that tracks have safety of the athletes in mind."
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