Luge is the fastest sliding sport, topping 140 km/h
Luge athletes race supine and feet-first on tiny sleds, steering with calves and shoulders after a seated start. Speeds routinely clear 140 km/h; Manuel Pfister hit 154 km/h at Whistler before the 2010 Games. The French dialect word for a small coasting sled entered English in 1905.
Unlike head-first skeleton with its running start, luge stays face-up. Sled racing appears in fifteenth-century Norway; organized luge coalesced in St. Moritz after hotelier Caspar Badrutt sold winter resorting. The first meeting ran in 1883; a Dresden federation formed in 1913 before merging into bobsleigh governance in 1935.
North America’s first run opened at Lolo Hot Springs, Montana, in 1965; USA Luge only organized in 1979 despite earlier Olympic entries. The first World Championships were held in Oslo in 1955, the International Luge Federation was founded in 1957, and luge joined the Winter Olympics in 1964. Badrutt's adventurous English guests had started it by commandeering delivery boys' sleds and crashing into pedestrians in the village lanes.
The first American artificial track was finished in 1979 for the 1980 Lake Placid Games, and a second was built near Park City, Utah, for Salt Lake City in 2002. In 2019 Canadians Caitlin Nash and Natalie Corless became the first all-female pair to race a senior World Cup doubles event.
Racing sleds weigh 21 to 25 kilograms for singles and 25 to 30 for doubles. Riders lie flat with heads low and steer mainly with their calves, pressing the right calf to go left and the left to go right, while averaging 120 to 145 kilometres per hour and pulling up to 5g in banked curves. Harder ice gives less grip and faster runs, and brushing a wall costs time. Results are timed to a thousandth of a second on artificial tracks, most of which are refrigerated, though St. Moritz's is not. Unlike skeleton and bobsleigh, which share a federation, luge is governed separately.
Source: Luge
