There comes a time in every single-person luge racer’s life when he has to ask himself serious questions.
“Am I lonely?”
“Am I cold?”
“Would it be better if I had a friend to go along with me on this very short trip down an icy track?”
And I suppose that was the beginning of the two-man luge — a sport that makes even the most understanding sports enthusiast question its validity and purpose as a sport.
For those of you who aren’t watching the 2006 Winter Olympics being held in Turin, Italy, or are just nonchalantly tuning in because it is taking Scrubs’ time-slot, two-man luge is a special sport.
It’s basically a time-trial event where two athletes, almost exclusively male, ride with each other, one between the other’s legs, on their backs down a slippery track at speeds close to 70 miles per hour.
I don’t want to comment on the obvious peculiarities of the sport that urbandictionary.com calls “the most homoerotic of all sports,” but two-man luge could present a situation that would be a literal Brokeback Mountain situation — think about it. The two-man luge also represents a larger problem of seemingly superfluous and trivial sports and events on the slippery track on which lugers, skeleton racers and bobsledders risk injury to compete.
On the same tunnel the two-man luge teams bond in the manliest of ways, a scandal that boggles the mind is slowly unfolding.
Skeleton sled racer Zach Lund is under investigation by both the World Anti-Doping Agency and The Court of Arbitration for Sport after testing positive for finasteride, an anti-doping agent he claims got into his system from an anti-baldness drug. Perhaps Mr. Lund was a tad worried about male pattern baldness, perhaps not, but the issue really at hand is not whether he was doping or not.
Before we get into the ludicrous idea of doping in skeleton racing, maybe it would be best for everyone to understand what this lunatic sport actually entails.
Skeleton racers are just like luge racers, but in this case they race head first on a heavier sled.
Now back to the case of Mr. Lund. It seems to me, a sledding layman by all means, skeleton racing would not necessarily be a sport where someone doping would have an advantage. The sport requires only a few seconds of athletic running, and the rest seems to be all technique, holding on for dear life and a lot of prayer.
Doping usually occurs in highly aerobic sports like cycling, not sports where gravity does most of the work. In fact, the only Olympic athlete to be caught doping wasn’t even a Winter Olympics athlete, but rather Tyler Hamilton — a world-class cyclist on the American Olympic team and formerly of Team Phonak.
I would hope the whole situation surrounding Mr. Lund is a misunderstanding, and he was only worried about going a little skinny on top, because to lose the opportunity to compete in the Olympics for such a frivolous reason as doping in the skeleton race would be disheartening for not only the fans of this niche sport, but for fans of the Olympics as a whole.
I have been a fan of the sledding races ever since I was a little boy wishing to someday race headfirst down a track made of bone-crushing ice. OK, that’s a lie, I actually started liking them when I saw the film Cool Runnings, but I am afraid the directions these sports are taking are a tad … stupid.
The existence of two-man luge and the scandals surrounding skeleton racing (there is also a sexual harassment accusation surrounding former U.S. coach Tim Nardiello) are sending the sled sports down a slippery slope toward losing their validity and becoming a joke — more than they already are. Pun intended.
