I will admit that I was scared.
My body was crammed uncomfortably inside the unforgiving, spartan, cold-metal fuselage of a two-man Olympic bobsled. My hands were clutching at two handles attached to ropes that were supposed to steer this fiendish machine, which can reach speeds of up to 90 miles per hour as it hurtles down the bobsled-and-luge track, a huge, menacing, surreal, snakelike sculpture of ice and concrete."Scared" is not really the word for how I felt. I was terrified. Only one thing kept me from losing control and screaming hysterically and peeing in my thermal underwear, and that was the knowledge that this particular bobsled was not, technically, hurtling down the bobsled run. It was sitting motionless on a level surface next to the bobsled-storage shed. So I was unlikely to crash. But I still didn't like it.
"Hey!" I said. "I'm stuck in here!"
"It's not real comfortable," agreed Greg Sebald, helping me climb out. Greg is the driver of this bobsled. He's a 30-year-old patent attorney from Minneapolis, but he's representing Greece in the Olympics. He can do this because His mother is Greek, so he has dual citizenship; and "Minneapolis" is a Greek name (it means, "City with a Greek name").
Greg has been a bobsled driver for only two years. One day he just decided to do it, so - I am not making this up - he enrolled in bobsled-driving school, where he got a bobsled license.
(I don't know what happens if you go down the bobsled run without a license. Perhaps you get pulled over by the Bobsled Police.)
Then he contacted the Greek Olympic Committee and arranged to represent Greece, which is not a major world bobsled power. Greg is driving a rental bobsled.
"We had to give them a damage deposit," he told me.
I asked him if he gets scared, going down the track.
"I'm scared every time," he said. "I'm especially worried that, one of these days, I'm going to open my eyes."
You have to admire this attitude. I think we should all root for Greg, and, if we have invented anything, we should hire him to obtain the patent for us, once the Olympics are over, assuming he survives.
Actually, I'm sure he'll do fine. The people I worry about are the ones who compete in the luge event, which consists of hurtling down the track at 80 miles per hour while lying backwards on a "sled" that is about the size of a cafeteria tray.
My guide to this event was Dmitry Feld, a stocky, bearded man who is a coach and public-relations person for the U.S. luge team. He started luging as a youth in the Soviet Union, coming to the United States in 1978. He is an extremely outgoing person who seems to be close personal friends with everybody in the world. It takes him forever to walk anywhere because people are constantly stopping him to shake his hand, hug him, etc. Reindeer come out of the woods to lick him. If alien life forms ever land here, their first words will be "Yo! Dmitry!"
So anyway, during luge practice one day, Dmitry and I stood at the bottom of the Olympic run while he explained the sport to me.
"You steer with leg and shoulder," he was saying. "You try to be as aerodynamically as possible. Here he comes now. Look."
I turned toward the track and WHOOOOOOOSH this thing went past, faster than you could say "WHOOOOOOOSH," faster than you could see; all that registered was a blue blur traveling at - I am good at judging these things - the speed of light.
"My," I said.
"Yes," agreed Dmitry.
I cannot adequately describe to you how scary the luge event looks. Let me just say this: At the end of the run, there is a long section that slants steeply uphill, so the sleds can slow down. Try to imagine the fastest sled ride that you ever had. The luge people go five times as fast as that UPHILL.
I suggested to Dmitry that anybody who would do this had to be a few utensils shy of a place setting. He shook his head.
"We are not crazy people," he said. "We are just crazy people who wants to win Olympic medal."
Fair enough.