Go, Street Luge Racer

Pamela Zoolalian’s idea of fun? Hurtling down a road at 60 or more miles an hour, two inches above the asphalt, supine on her luge board.

Dangerous? You bet. But, Zoolalian will tell you, when it comes to living dangerously, her sport of street luge, an outgrowth of downhill skateboarding and a sort of renegade cousin to the Olympic sport of ice luge, is child’s play compared with her day job as a fashion designer. There, she’s only as good as her last collection--and failing to spot a trend can be fatal.

Luge and fashion, her two passions, are “the yin and yang of my life,” says Zoolalian, who’s head designer for Elleven, a new surf-oriented division of Garden Grove-based BodyWaves. When she describes the clothes as young and full of energy, she might be describing herself.

Zoolalian, who’ll say only that she’s in her late 20s, sits in an office cluttered with racks of clothing and big bolts of fabric and talks about how she got there. Minutes into the conversation, it’s clear that there’s a good level head under the short-cropped fuchsia hair.

As for that hair, well, she went pink when she started making a name for herself in street-luge competition, where women--who are scarce in the sport--compete against the guys. As she explains, “I didn’t want anybody to think I was this little tiny boy winning.”

Just under 5 feet, 3 inches and 110 pounds, she is definitely “no 98-pound weakling.” Indeed, she is the only woman in street luge history to qualify for the Gravity Games, where she’ll compete against 31 men.

The games, the second annual extreme sports competition to be held in Providence, R.I., on July 15-23, and scheduled to be telecast in the fall on NBC, include such adrenaline-pumping sports as aggressive in-line skating, downhill skateboarding and freestyle motocross. The luge course is a half-mile asphalt road, with a 90-degree right-hand turn near the start, several s-curves and a sharp left near the finish line. The winner will earn $12,000 in prize money.

Five years ago, after seeing street luge on a telecast of the Extreme Games (now called the X Games sponsored by ESPN), she marched down to a Home Depot, bought wood, made a board and took it into the hills above Pasadena at 2 o’clock that morning for a test run.

She recalls, “I was absolutely petrified. You’re lying on your back, looking over your belly and across your toes,” leaning this way and that to steer. At first, “All I could hear was my heart. I could literally hear the blood circulating through my body.” But as she relaxed, she “started hearing the wind and the wheels. I was hooked.”

Street luge surfaced in the ‘70s, enjoyed a spurt of popularity, then kind of languished until being revived in the early ‘90s.

A race begins with riders--called pilots--sitting upright on their wheeled aluminum boards with form-fitting seats, pushing off by paddling the asphalt with leather-clad palms. Once they gain momentum, they lie on the boards, making themselves aerodynamic, heads lifted ever so slightly, hurtling downhill to the finish line.

Between them and the finish is a steep road that’s apt to have hairpin turns, with little room for error, all the better for the adrenaline rush competitors refer to as being “amped.” There is neither steering wheel nor brakes. To stop, lugers drag one foot on the asphalt.

When she started competing in late 1996, Zoolalian says, “The top guys took a lot of interest in me,” somewhat amused that a girl had come out to play. “When I started winning, they stopped giving me hints.” San Diego-based Extreme Downhill Games, sanctioning body for the Gravity Games,

ranks her 10th among 49 pros on a points-earned basis. She is one of a handful of women competing at the international level.

Says EDG executive director Grace Quinn, “Her racing strategies are just phenomenal.” Outweighed by the men, she’s learned to position herself to take advantage of the wind drafts they create. “The boys have nicknamed her the draft queen.”

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Zoolalian is a familiar sight at major meets, traveling from her home in Pasadena as far as Australia. She’s the one on the custom-made pink aluminum board, wearing a pink leather bodysuit with extra butt padding and a pink helmet. The suits scuff and tear, and each racing season she needs two new ones. Her board, customized to her height and weight, loses flexibility and is also replaced annually.

One of her favorite races is the “hot hill” event in the Austrian Alps. “The gnarliest road: a sheer drop on one side and sharp rocks on the other.”

Researchers speculate that some people are born with an “I love danger” gene.

“I have to have that gene,” says Zoolalian, who as a toddler took off solo on a toboggan at Wrightwood, leaving the adults “freaking out.” She also climbed trees and jumped off rooftops. “Everybody used to think my brother and I were twin boys.”

For fun now, she jumps out of airplanes, rides a motorcycle, is a downhill bike racer and a scuba diver. She also surfs but “couldn’t claim to be some rad surfer chick.”

The rad surfer chicks are the nine top women who are paid to wear Elleven board shorts and T-shirts and to model Elleven clothing in surfer-oriented magazines such as Wahine.

Zoolalian grew up in Monrovia, one of three children of an Armenian father who was an MIT-educated engineer and an artistically inclined French mother. She used to design and make clothing for her dolls and, later, for herself.

“I’d make my own patterns out of newspaper without knowing what the heck I was doing,” Zoolalian says.

After high school, she honed her skills at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles, where she studied for three years, earning an associate of arts degree and learning the nitty-gritty of fashion design and construction. There, too, she learned that, in the world of fashion, reality and fantasy are “like day and night.” In other words, a great design isn’t a great design if it’s not wearable.

While at the institute in 1992, Zoolalian won a competition sponsored by famed Italian shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo. She almost didn’t enter. Checking out the Ferragamo store on Rodeo Drive beforehand, she thought, “Gosh, these are like shoes my Mom would wear.” But, for a lark, she submitted her design for a “kind of impish” yellow patent-leather sandal.

Before she knew it, she was spending two expense-paid months in Florence, Italy, living in a 13th century apartment with a view of the duomo, the famed cathedral. She worked on Ferragamo’s clothing line and “helped develop a couple of their scarf prints,” she says. “I was still very, very green. They let me play around, totally just draw. It was awesome.”

Back in the real world, she landed a job post-graduation with a downtown design house, “doing all the grunt work” like pattern-cutting, and working with fabric vendors and contractors. Moving on to Jonathan Martin, she arrived “just before they started doing everything overseas. They got rid of three divisions” and numerous employees, including Zoolalian.

Her introduction to the corporate world was with BodyWaves, where she landed early in 1997 as an associate designer. “The president of the company believed in me,” she says, “and kept kicking me and pushing me.” When the fledgling Elleven division debuted as sponsor of last summer’s U.S. Open of Surfing event for women in Huntington Beach, she was head designer.

“I’m really stoked that the girls love the clothes,” says Zoolalian, whose first line is now in stores. It includes colorful knee-length board shorts as an alternative to short shorts and mid-thigh shorts. In sizes from 1 to 13, her designs are for the young woman “out there trying to make a statement.”

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And why the name Elleven? She explains, “Our whole concept is beyond the perfect 10.”

Zoolalian is now wrapping up her summer 2001 collection and sometimes wonders what year this is. There’s about a year’s lead time from paper to rack, which makes trend spotting dicey.

She knows that “staying on the game” means checking out music and movies, reading trade papers and “knowing what’s going on in the [fashion] hot spots of the world.” Trends are tricky: “If it’s too soon, it’s a bad thing. If it’s too late, it’s a bad thing.”

Her employer not only encourages Zoolalian the street luger but is considering becoming her sponsor. Zoolalian the athlete’s career has been on hold for about a year, a result of shattering an ankle at the 1998 X Games.

“I was going through the black hole, a 90-degree right and a 90-degree left,” and while trying to pass was shoved to the side, landing among the hay bales.

She shrugs.

“At 60 miles per hour, you’re going 88 feet per second,” she says. “It’s kind of a surreal experience, everything flying by you. There’s no room for error. If you’re on the outside of a turn and a big guy can’t stick it, he’s going to crush you.”

Her size does matter. “On the big, made-for-TV courses (read: short), it’s a big disadvantage,” she says, as upper-body strength is all important. “You can win or lose a race just based on your start.”

She compensates for her size by using strategy. Pulling off other pilots’ drafts is “kind of my specialty. If I’m behind them, people get a little worried. They know something’s going on, but they don’t know when.”

Bob Pereyra, a veteran street luger from Northridge who’ll compete in the Gravity Games and, for the sixth time, in the X Games, says of Zoolalian, “She’s got a lot of spirit and a lot of heart. She has a lot of friends in the sport. Pamela shows up--it’s 50 guys and one girl. She’s gotta be tough.” He mentions the inscription on the back of her pink helmet, “Spanked by a chick,” and says, “Nobody wants to read that.”

Pereyra has seen women come and go. Other women have “thought they would become superstars right off, go on TV, make millions, be sponsored by some big company” and when they didn’t, he says, they dropped out.

Zoolalian is paid to wear sponsors’ logos, and picks up enough prize money to cover her travel expenses, equipment ($1,000-plus for a board, $1,500 for each leather suit) and wind up with “a little pocket change.” This summer she’ll be featured on Fleer’s first extreme sports trading cards.

When guys see her at the starting line, she says, “They know if I’m on my game, I can beat them.” No more “token chick.”

Beverly Beyette can be reached at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.