WORLDWIDE

Me Olympian! Sort of. (page 2)
Stricken with Olympic fever? Can't make it to British Columbia? You can still get your five-ring fix.
By Lisa Gregoire with photography by Nancie Battaglia

Click map to enlarge

All you need to know — wait for it — is that ice and snow, at optimum temperatures, are very slippery, and what Canadian doesn't love, and also fear, that simple fact? Luge athletes at the Whistler Sliding Centre are busting records at 153 kilometres an hour, more than double my speed. I don't even think I could drive that fast in a car. In the summer Olympics, scantily clad athletes throw heavy balls, jump over a pole and run around a lot; they cycle, row, wrestle, tumble, swim and dive. It's impressive, for sure, but disjointed. In winter sports, it all comes down to that splendid lack of friction: hurl yourself forward or downhill, nail that triple salchow, curl your rock onto the button and shoot a rifle if you have to, but for God's sake, keep gliding.

You can test your limits of velocity in nearly every Olympic event at Lake Placid, year-round home to only 2,600 people but the destination of a whopping two million visitors annually — about a fifth of them Canadians from Montréal, Ottawa and Toronto. If the money wasn't green, I'd think I was in Jasper: snowboarders trade cigarettes and stories outside pubs and sushi restaurants; cafes are crowded with pinkcheeked children drunk on fresh air and cocoa; and colourful lights dispatch any trace of winter's gloom. People come to participate in or watch myriad local, national and international competitions, others to roam the ample and plush cross-country trails or shred the steepest vertical drop east of the Rockies at Whiteface Mountain. Some come to drink beer, talk cardiovascular device sales and curl.

“It's harder than bocce, I'd say, but fun,” says Charlie Favilla in that unmistakable On the Waterfront New Jersey accent. The area vice-president for Covidien is here with a handful of 30- and 40-something company managers on a team-building competition. They've never curled. “You see it on TV, you see the sweepers,” Favilla rolls his eyes in faux mockery, “but sweeping obviously makes a big difference.”

We're inside the Olympic Center, originally built for the 1932 Games and expanded in 1980 to include the rink where Team USA beat the Soviet Union for gold in hockey during the fabled Miracle on Ice. It now contains four rinks and a Winter Olympics museum brimming with uniforms, equipment, posters, torches and mascots. The Covidien lads have graciously invited me to join their two-day sport marathon, which begins with a little curling. Peter Frampton and the The Doobie Brothers kick it old-school from the loudspeakers and men with brooms huddle around the house shouting “Oh yeah, baby,” and “that's my boy,” as stones clap and spin away.

When we reassemble at the bobsled starting gate the next morning, the mood is more subdued. When training and competition schedules allow it, the sliding centre offers public bobsled rides, luge-type sled rides and skeleton clinics. Forty-five kilometres of cooling tubes keep the 1.4-kilometre track, built in 2000, evenly frozen and a maintenance crew uses a small Zamboni-like machine, trowels and scrapers to smooth out the ruts. But the Covidien lads seek other mundane trivia, like how fast they'll be plummeting down the mountain: about 80 kilometres an hour. They take turns sinking half-reluctantly into the made-for-tourists, five-person sled, which comes with a driver and a brakeman, and bracing for the frozen roller coaster.

“This is a monumental moment. I'm dizzy, but in a good way,” declares Nunzio Leo, a manager from Massachusetts, after his breathless ride. Leo's a big fellow and one usually associates bulk with machismo, but he admits he nearly bailed before the run — out of terror. (It's a good thing he didn't see the poster in the museum showing spectacular bobsled wipeouts on the old 1980 track.)