The New York Times-20080126-A Light at the End Of the Half-Pipe- Through Closed Eyes

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A Light at the End Of the Half-Pipe, Through Closed Eyes

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THE last thing I saw before plunging down the bobsled track at the Olympic Sports Complex outside Lake Placid, N.Y., was an eerie orange light. I shivered in a wind chill of minus 17 degrees that penetrated all the way from my crash helmet to my long johns. I realized that the orange light was the sunset reflecting off the summit of Whiteface Mountain a dozen or so miles to the north. But I had no idea whether it foreboded the thrill of a lifetime or imminent death.

Next thing I knew, we lurched forward and downward. I hunkered over in the third seat of our four-man fiberglass sled, clutching a pair of metal handholds. All I could see was another sliver of orange. It was the parka of the guy in the second seat, a motorsports radio broadcaster named Paul Bartholomew. Paul and I were merely dead weight, what veteran bobsledders call sandbags.

Our fates rode on the expertise of two would-be Olympians. Our driver, John Napier, 21, was the pilot of the United States national team's No. 3 sled. Our brakeman, Ethan Albrecht-Carrie, 26, was a former decathlete training to become a driver. Our sled measured 14 feet long, and it weighed more than 1,400 pounds with the four of us onboard.

As I soon discovered, gravity could be either friend or foe. The Lake Placid bobsled track is among the most treacherous in the world. Opened in 2000 on the site of the mothballed 1980 Olympic track, it is a mile-long half-pipe with 20 turns and a vertical drop of 40 stories. Viewed from above, it resembles a serpentine roller coaster with a heart-shaped bottom.

Lake Placid is not the fastest track in the world, but it's definitely the most technically challenging for a driver because of the ways the turns come at you, Ethan would later inform me. You can crash in every turn.

I reckoned that neither John nor Ethan wanted this to be their final run, and I tried to hold that thought as I stared at Paul's back. It was no use. The bobsled dove to the left. My head pressed down on my neck. My stomach leaped up into my throat. Then, just as suddenly, we seemed to flatten out.

Before I could exhale a grateful breath, the sled jerked back to the right, yanking my torso sideways until it was parallel to the floor of the track. My shoulders collapsed under pressure equal to four times the pull of gravity. Bailing out was impossible. My only viable option was to hang on. I squeezed the metal handholds until my fingers and forearms burned. Then I closed my eyes, and prayed.

For the sake of a smooth transition into the following turn, I could claim that was when my bobsledding due diligence flashed through my brain. But that would be a lie. All I saw through my mind's eye was darkness. In retrospect, that vision of absolute nothingness was a fitting image for the reckless executive pursuit into which I had just lost myself.

Bobsledding traces its origins to a motley crew of late-19th-century English aristocrats on winter vacation in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Bored with conventional skiing, they devised a potentially deadly series of downhill races that required contestants to sit upright on modified wooden toboggans. By 1924, this pastime had evolved into an Olympic sport using four-man sleds. Two-man sleds made their debut at the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid. Women's bobsledding with two-seater sleds became an Olympic sport in 2002.

Up through the 1992 Winter Games, American bobsledders rode foreign-made sleds and practiced mainly on foreign tracks. Enter Geoff Bodine, a champion Nascar driver, and Bob Cuneo, an automotive engineer at Chassis Dynamics of Oxford, Conn. With $200,000 in seed money from Mr. Bodine, Mr. Cuneo built bobsleds for the American team that featured flatter, more aerodynamic bodies than the traditional teardrop-shaped models, and chassis and steering mechanisms that made them as responsive as racecars. American bobsledders have since captured four Olympic medals, including a women's gold in 2002, nearly a score of World Cup medals and two overall World Cup titles.

Like aspiring Olympians, nonathletes can experience bobsledding at a limited number of places. The United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation offers four-day fantasy camps in Lake Placid and Park City, Utah, for fees starting at $1,800; the camps provide basic training in driving, braking and push-starting sleds. Both Lake Placid and Park City also give $75 rides to the general public on four-man sleds with expert drivers and brakemen.

My four-man bobsled ride occurred during warm-ups for the third annual Chevy Geoff Bodine Bobsled Challenge, a bobsled federation fund-raising event that pits teams of Nacsar drivers against teams of National Hot Rod Association drag racers. But since I had my eyes closed most of the time, I had no clue what actually happened until I conducted post-ride interviews with John, Ethan and my fellow sandbag, Paul. If my ignorance and self-induced blindness hardly constituted bliss, they probably prevented me from suffering a heart attack before we crossed the finish line.

We launched from Start 3, a quarter-mile below the highest start. John steered with D-rings attached to a pair of ropes. We dove straight down into Turn 4, a parabolic-shaped left-hand loop known as Whiteface Turn. Turn 5, the first right-hander on our run, was the start of a five-turn section known as the Devil's Highway. I figure we must have been somewhere between Turn 7 and Turn 8 when I shut my eyes. By Turn 9, I was squeezing the handholds with all my might.

Suddenly, I felt a crushing G-force. John was steering through the 20-foot-high wall of Turn 10, known as Shady II, in honor of a similarly tricky curve on the old track. Ethan later informed me that the top runner of our sled was a good 17 feet above the floor of the track. John eased out of the chute to keep from ping-ponging off the walls. Then we shot through a section known as the Labyrinth, where we kept gaining speed.

At what I later learned was Turn 15, the start of the heart-shaped section of the track, I felt the sled slow and the G-forces drop. For an instant, I thought -- make that, hoped -- that the ride was over. Instead, we picked up speed again. John whipped around Turn 17 with our top runner about 15 feet up the wall. We shimmied through a relatively flat stretch around Turn 18. At Turn 19, the bottom of the heart, the nose of the sled pointed uphill. I felt us steadily losing speed as we cleared Turn 20 and crossed the finish line.

Ethan slammed down the steel-toothed brake plate. I heard Paul cheering in adrenaline-fueled jubilation. Then I opened my eyes and saw John flash a satisfied grin. That felt kind of fast, he allowed.

The timing clock showed that we had covered three-quarters of a mile in less than 52 seconds. Our top speed was 72 miles an hour, a good 10 m.p.h. faster than typical top speeds from Start 3. John attributed our unofficial record time to the subzero temperature. When the ice gets that hard, the runners don't dig in as deeply, so you have less bite, he noted. You also have less control.

I asked Ethan whether he'd had to brake hard through the turns. You only use the brake after you cross the finish line so the sled won't go off the end of the track, he replied. If you brake through the turns you can screw up the G-forces and go smashing into the low wall. Then he added, You were on a runaway sled.

I closed my eyes again, reeling as if I might faint. When I finally reopened them, the eerie orange sunset had disappeared, and the lamps along the bobsled track were glowing white as ice.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: At the Olympic Sports Complex outside Lake Placid, John Napier, front; Paul Bartholomew; Harry Hurt III; and Ethan Albrecht-Carrie before their run down the bobsled track. (PHOTOS BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)