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

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

Figure skating's long night, Sasha's goal not gold, bob(sledd)ing and weaving...and more

Seattle natives Apolo Anton Ohno, right, and J.R. Celski crash.  (AP / Jeff Roberson)

A few of the pithiest quotes I’ve heard in recent weeks and some of my pithy (I hope) opinions, as well.

"It rains so much we have to do some kind of indoor stuff," Olympic gold medalist Apolo Anton Ohno, explaining why the nation’s top two short-track male speedskaters, he and J.R. Celski, come from Seattle.

And second prize is one winter trip to Sofia, Bulgaria: Several U.S. figure skaters have made their second trip in a row to Sofia for the World Junior Championships. The event wound up back in Sofia this week after organizational problems forced the International Skating Union to move it from the original site: Ostrava, Czech Republic. Among the double trippers: Adam Rippon, 19, of Scranton, Pa., a runaway winner (nearly 19 points) of a second straight junior world title Thursday with a total score, 222.0, that makes him the 10th best performer in the world on any level this season.

"When I first came out this year, I could see what I was doing, and that actually made it a little harder.  I was driving by seeing and not by feel," U.S. bobsledder Steve Holcomb, who won a two-man bronze medal Sunday at the World Championships, on the surgery (implantable collamer lens) that he said improved his vision from 20/500 to 20/20 in 10 minutes.

Not a Nordic power yet: Lest anyone get carried away by the five medals U.S. athletes have won at the Nordic ski world championships, look at the results of everyone but the four medalists. Only one cross-country skier other than silver medalist Kikkan Randall has made the top 10 (a fourth by Kris Freeman); the relays finished 13th (men) and 14th (women) in fields of 15 entries each; and the leading men’s ski jumper (only one event contested so far) was 48th.

"I stripped my suit all the way down to my ankles," said U.S. Nordic combined skier Bill Demong on the futile search for his numbered bib before the jumping phase of Thursday’s team event at the Nordic worlds. After he (and thus the team) was disqualified, Demong found the bib had slid into his boot.

Third time's the charm? Jeremy Bloom was a terrific kick returner (led Big 12 in return yards in 2004) who was cut by the Eagles in 2007 and the Steelers in 2008. He was a terrific moguls skier (world champion in 2003) who finished ninth and sixth in his two Winter Olympic appearances. With the 2010 Olympics in mind, Bloom returned to World Cup competition last month after a three-year absence, but he is, unsurprisingly, not back in good enough form to be on the U.S. team for next week’s Freestyle World Championships on the 1998 Olympic hill in Japan.

"I wasn’t trying just to get an A on a paper. I was trying to have the best paper ever written," U.S. high hurdler Lolo Jones on why she didn’t run conservatively in the Olympic final, when she was a prohibitive favorite but finished seventh after stumbling over the penultimate barrier.

How to kill a sport in several easy lessons: Scheduled ending times for the upcoming World Figure Skating Championships in Los Angeles, another stroke of genius by the International Skating Union.  Tuesday, March 24, pairs short program, 11:40 p.m; Wednesday, March 25, pairs free skate, 11 p.m.; Friday, March 27, free dance, 11 p.m. Hey, ISU numbskulls: That’s 2 a.m. on the East Coast of Canada and the United States and even late in Los Angeles, given its notorious traffic at all hours. Maybe if the ISU limited the fields (there may be 50 men singles skaters, about half of whom need double runners), the program would end at a reasonable hour.

"I’m definitely not coming back because I feel like I need an Olympic gold. I would be coming back because I feel like I have more to give," Olympic silver medalist Sasha Cohen on why she is considering a return to competitive skating.

Burning up the track at both ends: U.S. track cyclist Taylor Phinney, 18, recently won the pursuit and kilometer events at a World Cup meet in Copenhagen, which the French sports newspaper L'Equipe compared to a runner winning the steeplechase and 400 meters. Olympic kilometer champion Florian Rousseau of France called Phinney's achievement unique, in that the kilo takes explosiveness and power, while the pursuit, four times as long, demands endurance. Phinney was seventh in pursuit at the Olympics, where he was two years younger than any of the other seven finalists.

"I've changed the word from 'expectations' to 'belief'; people expect me to do so well because they believe that I can,'' Katherine Reutter of Champaign, the leading woman on the U.S. short track team headed to Vienna for next week's world championships, on how working with a sports psychologist has helped her handle pressure created by her international success this season.

-- Philip Hersh

Brits break bobsled ice

  Nicola Minichiello drives Gillian Cooke (hidden) to a world title Saturday.  (Peter Morgan / Associated Press)

Rule, Britannia.

In bobsleds?

Until today, that hadn't happened at the worlds or Olympics since a British team won the two-man event at the 1965 worlds.

And it never had happened to Nicola Minichiello in any international event since she began driving a two-woman sled in 2002.

But Minichiello, 30, and neophyte brakewoman Gillian Cooke, 26, the Scottish indoor record holder in the long jump, utterly dominated the competition Friday and today to win the 2009 world title in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Fastest in three of the four runs, the Brits easily overcame a slight deficit after Friday to beat runners-up Shauna Rohbock and Elana Meyers of the United States by 38/100ths of a second, a significant margin in bobsled.

Rohbock, a 2006 Olympic silver medalist, and Meyers had led by 4/100ths before the third run.

"It's hard to have four consistent runs,'' Rohbock said after her sled was 2-1-2-3, losing most of the time in the final run.  "But that's what you need, and Nic had it.''

--Philip Hersh

U.S. sledders on track in worlds

U.S. bobsledders Shauna Rohbock and Elana Meyers are in the lead after Friday's first two runs of the World Bobsled Championships in Lake Placid, N.Y.

They won the second run by 6/100ths of a second to take an even more minuscule lead (4/100ths) over Nicola Minichiello and Gillian Cooke of Great Britain into the final two runs Saturday.

The U.S. performance is not surprising, given Rohbock's strong driving all season and the home-ice advantage.

Rohbock, an Olympic silver medalist in 2006 with Valerie Fleming as her pusher, skipped the World Cup race in Utah last week to maximize that advantage by taking more runs at Lake Placid.

"We're on the track here in October, and it's usually warm and rainy, and the ice is soft, so we don't really get to see the track prepared the way it is for worlds or a World Cup until January or February,'' Rohbock said before the worlds. "So it's kind of a new track for us as well until that time.

"Coming back here and missing that World Cup, we actually got to see the track like it's going to be for worlds, and I feel like that is going to give us the help we need to bring home medals at the world championship.''

It's a track that makes many sledders nervous, said leading U.S. men's driver Steve Holcomb, whose two-man competition begins Saturday.

"The track is very difficult, with a lot of tricky spots,'' Holcomb said. "One of the biggest players here is confidence going down the track. A lot of people get scared of the track. Having more runs here than anybody, we don’t have those nerves but more of competition nerves. It's a huge home-track advantage.''

Elana Meyers jumps into the sled with driver Shauna Rohbock at Friday's start. Credit: Mike Groll / Associated Press

-- Philip Hersh