Women’s bobsled will make its debut in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Skeleton will reappear after a 54-year absence.
So it’s up to luge to lend some stability to the goings-on beginning Sunday at the lightning-fast Utah Olympic Park track in Park City, and the slide-on-your-backside sport should be more than up to the challenge. Most of the thanks for that belongs to a German team that’s as sure a bet in these parts as gridlock and bag searches.
The Games’ safest gamble indeed might be that a German will stand atop the medal podium in women’s singles luge. The German women haven’t lost a major international race in more than five years, a winning streak of 50. Silke Kraushaar and Barbara Niedernhuber return after their gold- and silver-medal victories in the 1998 Nagano Games.
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In men’s singles, Germany’s Georg Hackl is working on a streak of his own. The 35-year-old soldier has won three consecutive Olympic gold medals and could become the first Winter Olympian to win four straight in the same individual event.
The reasons for German dominance aren’t difficult to identify. Start with the fact that luge is so popular in Germany that Hackl has described the demand for his autograph as occasionally “stressful.”
Then there are Germany’s four luge tracks, twice as many as any other country has. That allowed the 31-year-old Kraushaar to begin sliding at 9 and Hackl at 12, routinely getting in several runs after school at a track near his home.
“They’ve been sliding almost as long as we’ve been alive,” said Becky Wilczak, 21, of River Forest, the oldest of the three U.S. women’s competitors.
The suspense in women’s luge is whether Germany will sweep the medals, with Sylke Otto expected to challenge Kraushaar for gold.
Wilczak, fifth on the 2001-02 World Cup circuit, has to cope with the condition of her father. Tom Wilczak is awaiting a liver transplant but plans to attend his daughter’s races Tuesday and Wednesday unless a suitable organ becomes available in the meantime.
Hackl’s father, also named Georg, died Jan. 18, but the son was back training the next day. That illustrates the obsession with luge that has made him a popular gold-medal pick, even if 1998 silver-medal winner Armin Zoeggeler of Italy has been the world’s dominant competitor the last two seasons.
Hackl, however, is a master at peaking for the Olympics, in which he won a silver medal in 1988. He entered the ’98 Games in a slight slump and proceeded to win by more than half a second, an astounding margin in a sport timed to thousandths of a second.
Calling himself “an old man now,” Hackl has tried to shift the favorite’s tag to Zoeggeler and Austria’s Markus Prock, the current World Cup champion and two-time Olympic silver medalist. His rivals aren’t buying that, however, especially after he showed up at a recent race with a sled Porsche helped build.
“Hackl has the unique ability to rise to any occasion,” said Tony Benshoof, the top U.S. men’s singles competitor.
In Nagano, U.S. lugers reached the medal podium for the first time, with Chris Thorpe and Gordy Sheer taking silver in the doubles and Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin bronze. A German team, of course, won the gold medal.
Sheer retired but Thorpe is back for his fourth Olympics, this time with two-time Canadian Olympian Clay Ives, who gained dual citizenship in 1998. Grimmette and Martin are back intact and represent the best U.S. chance for a medal. With ’98 winners Stefan Krausse and Jan Behrendt retired, Germany’s best hope to retain gold is World Cup champs Patric Leitner and Alexander Resch.
“We’re right on the edge of catching the Germans,” Grimmette said. “The first step was to break into the medals.
“What’s important now is to take the lessons that have been learned and refine them so we’re on top of the podium.”