Grandma Luge to Put Pedal to Mettle in 5th and Final Olympics

Old Man Winter has nothing on Grandma Luge.

Forty-five-year-old Anne Abernathy, with four Olympics behind her and a fifth looming in 2002, could capture the gold as the oldest female competitor in the luge if medals were given for longevity.

Abernathy claims--through a technicality--to be the oldest woman to successfully compete as a winter Olympian.

At age 45 and 318 days, Edwina Chamier of Canada competed in the alpine combined event during the 1936 Winter Olympic Games, according to record books. But she withdrew before the final slalom run and was disqualified.

Abernathy, who competes for the U.S. Virgin Islands, has been the senior athlete in her sport for the last four Winter Games.

“The last Olympics, I was twice as old as most of the athletes and I’ll be three times as old” when Salt Lake City hosts the 2002 Winter Games, she said.

The European press has dubbed her Grandma Luge, although she has no grandchildren and has never married. She will be 48 when she competes in 2002.

Abernathy’s age was something of a novelty during the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, a nation that reveres elders. And in Europe, she says, journalists usually write about the first-, second- and third-place finishers--and Grandma Luge.

A 40-something female athlete lying on a sled, feet first, careening around hairpin curves at 80 mph, steering only with the shoulders or feet, does attract attention.

The turns, combined with a required night run, make it one of the games’ more dangerous sports. Three athletes have been killed in luge accidents since it became an Olympic sport in 1964.

Abernathy came to the sport relatively late. She fell in love with the luge at age 28 when her parents gave her a trip with a local ski club to Lake Placid, N.Y., which was host to the 1980 Winter Games.

“A sled went by and I went, ‘Wow!’ ” she recalls. Two years later she tried it and was hooked. “I never thought of it as speed. I thought of it as fun. That’s why I’m still doing it.”

When she entered her first Olympics at 34 in 1988, it was the first time the Virgin Islands had competed in a Winter Games. The islands, like Puerto Rico and Guam, compete as independent nations. Although she trains at the Olympic track in Park City, she won’t train with the U.S. team.

That’s not unusual, she says. “If a U.S. athlete went to Germany and wanted to train on the track when the Germans were training, the Germans most likely would not want them to train” with them, she said.

Training and competition keep her away from home 11 months of the year. Getting ready for Nagano, she traveled around the world three times. And she’s spent a lot of time traveling the European World Cup circuit.

“I’m building a home down there [on the Virgin Islands] and I haven’t even seen it. I lost everything with Hurricane Marilyn--lost my house, my car, my boat. Everything was gone, so I’m still trying to rebuild from that.”

In preparing for 2002, Abernathy hopes to form a support team with experts in biomechanics and physiology who will help her pinpoint why she is so slow at the top of her runs.

“I’m normally one of the slowest starters, but then I make up the time on the tracks,” she said. “On the start, I am maybe a tenth of a second behind.”

She cited the 1997-98 World Cup as an example, where she was 27th of 28 competitors at the start but finished 13th on the run. In Nagano, where she finished 24th of 29 in the women’s singles with a final time of 3:30.707, the gold, silver and bronze winners finished in 3:23.779, 3:23.781 and 3:24.253, respectively.

“She’s been pretty healthy in the last two seasons,” said Dallas Simons of Herndon, Va., Abernathy’s physical trainer for 12 years.

It wasn’t always so. For more than a decade Abernathy has battled Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymph nodes that affects the body’s ability to fight infection. She also has fought through a fractured kneecap, torn ligaments in both knees, a broken wrist and elbow, and countless bumps and bruises.

Though she has never won a medal in a major competition, Abernathy remains determined. She used a loan to fund her trip to Lillehammer, Norway, and quit her job as programming producer for special projects for AOL International in March 1997 to train for the 1998 Winter Games.

“She really has a desire to succeed in luge, especially being from one of the ‘sun countries,’ ” Simons said. “She’s quit her job to train full time. Up until recently she drove around in cars that were falling apart. She goes into great debt to train and spends a lot of time trying to find sponsors.”

For several years she was financed in part by her employer, Spring International. Today, as president of her own finance company, Enterprise Fund, Abernathy can pack along her laptop and stay plugged in.

But competition and training can be expensive. There are coaching fees, travel expenses, room and board and track fees. A new sled costs about $2,000. For the 1998 Olympics, her expenses totaled between $60,000 and $70,000.

All that can make it difficult to be competitive, she has found.

At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, she was seeded among the top 12 female luge athletes for the first time.

“I train most of the time without a coach, and I’m competing against a lot of athletes that have a lot of coaches and videos, so it was a real thrill for me to make it to that level, because it takes a lot more work for me to get to that level,” Abernathy said.

The 2002 Winter Games will be her last. She has no plans to go for the overall longevity record of Winter Olympian James Coates of Great Britain. Coates was 53 when he competed in the skeleton luge in 1948, according to the “Complete Book of Winter Olympics.”

But that doesn’t mean Abernathy will leave the sport after 2002. She hopes to manage a team of luge athletes from the Caribbean, where license plates say “America’s Paradise” and ice is what keeps a tall drink cool.

“It’s probably going to be my greatest challenge,” she says.

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Career Highlights

Anne Abernathy’s career as a luge competitor:

1998: Placed 24th during the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan.

1997: Third-highest-ranked woman from the Americas in the overall World Cup standings.

1996: Finished 24th of 39 competitors in the world championships in Igls, Austria.

1994: Placed 20th among 24 competitors during Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway.

1992: Placed 22nd during Winter Olympics in Albertville, France.

1988: Placed 16th in Winter Olympics in Calgary at Alberta, Canada. It was the first time a Virgin Islands resident had competed in the Winter Games.

Associated Press