She’s Finding Ideal Line to Fulfillment

They talk about finding the ideal line, the most direct, trouble-free route through the twists and turns of a luge track.

They talk about finding it in life.

Never more true for Cammy Myler than in the Winter Olympics of 1994, when she wondered if she should be in Norway competing or at home with her brother Tim, who was dying of cancer.

Never more true than now, as she awaits word on her applications to law school, her appearance in the Winter Games here possibly the career finale for the four-time Olympian and seven-time national champion, clearly the United States’ best-ever female sledder.

“If nobody lets me in, I’ll continue sliding,” the cum laude graduate of Dartmouth said regarding her applications to the Cornell, Columbia, Penn and Boston College law schools.

Since it is almost certain she will be accepted, Myler, 29, added: “Luge has impacted my life, and I plan to stay involved in the luge movement through the Olympics.”

She is already a member of the USOC’s athletes advisory board and the executive board of the U.S. Luge Assn., a “budding Anita DeFrantz,” one luge official said in reference to the IOC vice president from Los Angeles.

On Tuesday, however, Myler was not pursuing a political line. She was on her sled at the Spiral for the first two heats in women’s luge, seeking that first luge medal for the U.S. and determined “to relax and have the best time I can.”

Her competition is formidable, including the top three finishers at Lillehammer: Gerda Weissensteiner of Italy, Susi Erdmann of Germany and Andrea Tagwerker of Austria.

“Is it possible for me to win a medal?” Myler said. “I don’t like to make predictions, but if you don’t think it will happen, it probably can’t. I don’t allow myself to think that way and I’ve never been one to set my sights low. The important thing is to leave no room for disappointment, and the only way to do that is by doing the best you can.”

On Tuesday, Myler’s medal hopes may have faded quickly. She was seventh after the two heats--the final two will be contested today.

Germany’s Barbara Niedernhuber and Silke Kraushaar, both wearing those controversial yellow booties, were 1-2.

Myler obviously has her work cut out. In her previous Olympics, she finished ninth at Calgary in 1988, fifth at Albertville in ’92 and 11th at Lillehammer, which she will remember as the best and worst of times.

Myler was honored there by being selected as the U.S. flag carrier in the opening ceremony, but she was not at peace, incapable of staying loose and relaxed on the sled. Steering, but not steering.

“There were a lot of external pressures,” she said. “It was difficult to stay focused.”

Her parents were in the process of a divorce. Tim, the brother who had first put her on a sled behind their Lake Placid, N.Y., home when she was 12 and a serious slider himself, was dying.

“I really struggled,” Myler said. “I was torn between feeling like I should be at home with Tim and wanting to pursue my dream. It’s so easy when you’re competing on an elite level to get caught up and forget there’s another world out there. Tim wanted me to stay, but I still wrestle with that. His illness and death put a lot of things in perspective for me and is the reason it’s important for me to have some balance in my life, not just luge.”

Balance comes in different forms. Myler took classes at Dartmouth for seven years while sledding the world, graduating in the summer of ‘95, the same summer that her brother died. She discovered balance on an easel, opting to take an art class and finding that she loved to paint.

“I fell into something I love, something that’s very important to me,” she said.

“More than that, it provided me with a catharsis at a time when I was trying to work through some of the issues stemming from my brother’s death.”

Artist and future lawyer. Honor graduate and elite athlete. Olympic dreamer through surgeries on both shoulders, three knee operations, thousands of hours in weight work and aerobic conditioning.

The perfect line?

“Maybe once or twice in a career you have that almost perfect run,” Myler said, knowing she may be getting her last crack at it here before embarking on all those other lines of her life.