2010 Olympic track’s unlucky Curve 13 gives sledders a 50-50 chance

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Steve Holcomb labels Curve 13 at the Whistler Sliding Center. Credit: USA Bobsled

WHISTLER, CANADA –- You had to figure the spot would carry some karmic weight, what with being Curve 13 on the sliding course for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

It’s second in a four-curve stretch of the Whistler Sliding Center that quickly became known as the Gold Rush Trail, because the top bobsledders, lugers and skeleton racers who get through it without a significant mistake have a good chance to be atop the medal stand next year.

U.S. bobsledder Steve Holcomb thought Curve 13 deserved a fame –- or infamy -- of its own after experiencing it in January. Watching half the sleds fail to navigate it successfully during the first day of four-man training for a World Cup race, Holcomb figured simple math was the way to express it on the handwritten sign he duct-taped to the track the next day.

You look up at the $81-million track on a quiet Wednesday three weeks after the last elite sliders have competed on it this season, and it doesn’t seem so malevolent, particularly with Curve 13 hidden by sun shades. But try careening down it after hitting speeds that have come stunningly close to 100 mph, and it’s probably not a place for Rasta Rockets.

‘It’s in an awkward part of the track where you have a lot of speed, the turns are coming close together, and there is not a lot of time to react,’ said Holcomb, among those who kept the curve’s downside percentage up in training before going on to a silver medal at the World Cup.

A lot of speed is the operative word on the Whistler track.

‘The track is incredibly fast,’ said Austria’s Andreas Linger, 2006 Olympic champion in doubles luge.

How fast?

Latvian bobsledder Janis Minins broke the world bobsled speed record at 95.08 mph. A month later German luger Felix Loch did the same in his sport with a speed of 95.68. The old luge record, set at St. Moritz, Switzerland, was 89.66.

‘It’s really unique worldwide,’ said two-time world champion Loch, 19.

Higher up the track is Lueders Loop, or Curve Seven. It is where Canadian driver Pierre Lueders, a 1998 Olympic champion, has spent hours trying to find the path guaranteed to keep his sled on the fast track -- and right side up -- for a few split seconds of racing.

‘It’s a handful, it really is,’ said U.S. luger Tony Benshoof, who hit 94.4 mph during the World Cup race in February.

Loch knows just how much. He crashed during an international training week on the course last November and tore two shoulder ligaments.

‘Standing at the start, you feel a special tension,’ Loch said, ‘because this track punishes the slightest mistake.’

Now that Holcomb has seen what the track is all about, he can’t wait to be back on it next February. Especially since a month after the Whistler races, Holcomb won the 4-man title at the world championships in Lake Placid, N.Y., first by a U.S. sled at worlds in 50 years.

‘It was kind of intimidating at first,’ Holcomb said of Whistler. ‘We knew they had problems in the Canadian team trials –- a lot of crashes, breaking equipment, people getting hurt, too fast, people saying there was no way sleds could make it down.

‘Each person that hears it, gets a little more exaggerated. The first week of training from the top, I was pretty nervous.

‘It was overhyped a little, but it was definitely fast. And tricky. No room for mistakes on the way down. It’s one of the most fun and challenging tracks in the world.’

Cool runnings, indeed.

-- Philip Hersh