The event returns to the Games this week for the first time in 54 years
02/18/2002
PARK CITY, Utah -- One day in 1997, Lincoln Dewitt lay prone on a tiny
sled with his head leading the way down the ice chute here and became a
bullet in a twisted barrel.
He hasn't been quite the same since.
Imagine sitting in a jet fighter as it pulls a four-G turn, centrifugal
force damming your blood stream and your head fighting to stay upright.
Once you do, you begin to appreciate the physics pressing on Dewitt's
body that day and all the days since that his chin has rattled inches
over the ice at 80 mph, all in the name of sport.
Dewitt, whose sport of skeleton racing returns to the Olympics this week
for the first time in 54 years, recalls starting his maiden run halfway
up the track.
He remembers "going through the first four turns, which are just kind of
slight turns . . . and looking up and realizing how much speed I'd
gained."
The world in his peripheral vision had become a white smudge.
Then he saw Turn 11.
"It looked like a wall you were going into. It didn't look like a turn.
And I just remember looking at it and thinking: I have no concept of the
physics that are about to be involved."
Dewitt, who is 34, and now lives here in Park City, has no memory of the
rest of the run.
He can't recall the next turn.
"I have no recollection clearly of anything."
Nothing but the end, when he turned to a friend and asked whether they
could get refunds for their season ski passes.
Because he was never going skiing again.
THE SPORT of skeleton racing began as a winter pastime in the late 1800s
in the village of St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Men and women swooshed down the snowy, postcard slopes and into the town
of Celerine, where the winner popped the cork on a bottle of champagne.
In 1892, an Englishman by the name of Child arrived on the St. Mortiz
slope with a new sled destined to earn him cases of bubbly.
Designed largely from metal, many spectators thought it resembled a
skeleton. Thus a light-hearted sport took on the most ominous of names.
Today the name seems fitting.
At an elevation of 7,324 feet, the Olympic skeleton track course drops
340 feet over a three-quarter-mile stretch with several hairpin turns
designed with roof-like covers to prevent sledders from catapulting into
the air.
Skeleton debuted in the 1928 Olympic games in St. Moritz. American
Jennison Heaton won the first gold medal in the sport, while his younger
brother, John, took the silver.
Then the sport quickly faded in popularity, not returning to the
Olympics for another 20 years before sliding once more into obscurity.
Riding another wave of popularity, 20 countries competed in skeleton
during the World Cup series in 1992. And at these Winter Games, 30
nations from six continents have skeleton teams.
Jim Shea Jr., 33, was the first American to win a world championship in
skeleon during the 1998-99 season.
DeWitt, 34, a Syracuse, N.Y., native, won his first World Cup gold just
before these Olympics began.
DeWitt, who graduated with an economics degree from the University of
Pennsylvania, says his parents were "pretty nervous" when they learned
he wanted to race skeleton.
Especially his mother. "Then they saw it, and then she was really
nervous."
A few weeks ago, DeWitt said his father tried the sport, in Lake Placid,
so "I guess you can tell where I get the smart gene from."
DeWitt and his teammates begin competing Wednesday. Until then they are
serving as ambassadors of their sport, trying to generate public
enthusiasm.
"I encourage everybody to take at least one run on the track," said
Tristan Gale, 21, of the women's team. "You finish and your eyeballs are
huge and it's just, 'What did I just do?' "
It's not, however, that easy to take Gale up on her suggestion. Only two
skeleton tracks exist in the United States: one in Park City and one in
Lake Placid.
Teammate Shea, a third-generation Olympian, says while bobsledding may
be called the champagne of thrills, skeleton sledding "is the moonshine
of thrills."
Chris Soule, 29, of Trumbull, Conn., who in between racing skeletons
works, appropriately enough, as a movie stuntman, says racing skeletons
is incomparable to anything he has ever done.
His father, Gale, can vouch for that.
Gale Soule went to watch his son race for the first time in 1997.
He didn't return to watch another race for two years because he was so
afraid he would see his son injured.
That's understandable when considering the preparation Chris Soule took
for his first run down the chute in Lake Placid.
As onlookers watched curiously, Soule took a roll of gray duct tape and
wrapped up his sweatered arms with tape all the way to his shoulders.
The reason?
So that when he banged back and forth into the walls on the way down,
the force wouldn't rip his sweater from his body.
