No Bones About It, the Skeleton Gives Competitors Quite a Rush

Pulling a 95-pound sled, you bound alongside the track, gaining speed. All at once you dive headfirst onto your sled. Down you go, chin hanging off, nose inches from the ice. You whoosh down the slick, mile-long course at 85 mph, sounding like an accelerating jet plane. You confront G-force winds on 15 to 20 grueling turns, hoping to high heaven that your neck muscles can keep your head held up.

This is skeleton: crazy to contemplate, terrifying to watch--and the latest sport to join the Winter Olympics. Its aficionados say skeleton takes them over with the rush of a powerful drug.

“I tried it once, and I was instantly hooked. I never looked back,” said Jim Shea, a third-generation Olympian who is one of five men on the U.S. skeleton team.

Mess up one turn and it reciprocates all the way down the track. Bump, bump, bump: That’s your shoulder, your knuckles--or worse, your head--smashing against the track if you don’t get it just right. Mass addiction is unlikely.

“The majority of people,” Shea noted, “try it once and walk to the parking lot with their helmets still on and drive away.”

But the minority--the certifiable few who are willing to don skintight, thermodynamic racing suits, helmets that wrap all the way around to their chins and track shoes with spikes--think it’s cool to pilot something that looks like a high-tech cookie sheet, and win or lose a race by one one-hundredth of a second. Around the world, there are perhaps 800 skeleton racers, known as sliders. In this country, the number is below 200.

LeaAnn Parsley, a 33-year-old firefighter who is one of two women representing the U.S. in skeleton here, said the sport’s novelty is part of the appeal. What other event, she observed, could you take up three years ago and now find yourself in the Olympics?

Mostly though, Parsley said, skeleton is about an unbelievable surge of excitement. She grew almost dreamy as she talked about her first time.

“They said I would either love it or hate it,” she recalled. Having the track lunge right at her, having to make split-second decisions at 80 mph: “I loved it.”

Men’s skeleton earned a spot at two previous Winter Olympics, in 1928 and 1948. Both Games were held in St. Moritz, Switzerland, where the sport was born more than 100 years ago and one of the few places where it was practiced. Never wildly popular, skeleton fell out of vogue until daredevils rediscovered it in the 1970s. Sliders lobbied to win a berth for skeleton in the 1998 Winter Games, but until 2002 the sport lacked the critical ratio of participant athletes and nations required by the International Olympic Committee.

The Utah Games will mark the first time female sliders have competed in an Olympics. Medal competition for men and women will take place Wednesday.

Little known outside Europe, the sport has a lot in common with bobsledding and luge, but predates both. Skeleton racers share their track with bobsledders and lugers, sometimes causing high-speed logjams. Recently, a skeleton slider died in Latvia after a collision with a bobsledder.

A skeleton sled is so bare-bones that many people think that is where the sport got its name. No one is quite certain, but others say the name derives from the deadly fear that overtakes most sane people when they watch the sport or venture to try it.

The sled, a fiberglass shell with a thin steel frame, is all of 2 inches thick. Roughly 3 feet long by slightly more than a foot wide, it moves on narrow runners. Skeleton sleds weigh 94.8 pounds for men and 77.2 pounds for women. There are no bells, no whistles, no brakes, no steering wheels, no gears. Sliders shift knees and drag feet to execute turns.

Strength is essential, as the skeleton racer must drag the sled for 50 meters before plunging down the track. In the split second of the transfer from sprinter to slider, the racer must switch from maximum energy to cool analysis.

If a slider feels that a course is bearing down too fast, that is a cue that the track and the slider’s thought process are out of sync. When this happens, some part of the slider’s body will hit the wall. Shoulders and knuckles are the most common casualty zones. Torn ligaments and broken bones abound. But as with luge and bobsledding, fatalities are rare in skeleton.

With fewer than a dozen tracks around the world, sliders make it their business to get to know their courses. Many sliders study tapes of the various tracks. Others spend hours reviewing copious notes.

Cranial wattage is helpful, acknowledged U.S. Olympian Lincoln DeWitt, who ranks No. 8 in the world. Although, the University of Pennsylvania graduate admitted, “Some people say, how smart can I be if I’m doing skeleton?”

Unlike beefed-up bobsledders and lugers, skeleton sliders must have a thin frame on top and be flexible and muscular on the bottom. Narrow shoulders are an advantage.

The key to skeleton superiority, said U.S. Olympic team manager Kevin Ellis, is aerodynamics. Sliders must cut through the wind. Their shoulders must be close to the sled, even if a wall happens to be headed straight toward them.

“Your natural instinct when you’re looking at a wall when you’re going 80 miles an hour is to move away,” Ellis said. “You have to come to some comfort level even if you do hit the wall.”

Although the sport looks brutish, skeleton in fact “takes quite a bit of time to learn properly,” said Ryan Davenport, the coach for the U.S. Olympic team. Aspiring sliders in the U.S. go to skeleton schools--either at Lake Placid, N.Y., or here in Park City.

Davenport, a former drag racer before he twice won world championships in skeleton, disputes the idea the sport is a maniac magnet.

“There are people who try to lump us in with the bungee jumpers,” he said, somewhat indignantly. “We do not have people of that mentality.”

Families of U.S. Olympic skeleton racers may not be so easily persuaded. In Bennington, Vt., the mother of Lincoln DeWitt remembered trying to sound nonchalant four years ago when her son took up a crazy-sounding sport. They eased into the conversation, the way parents do when their children are doing something frightful.

So, Eve Pearce asked her son, the Ivy League economics graduate, do you wear a helmet?

Yeah, mom, DeWitt said.

Pearce exhaled.

To help her accept his new pastime, DeWitt installed a video on his mom’s computer, showing him sliding. “I just watched it over and over until I could handle it,” Pearce said. “It took some getting used to. It really did.”

For his part, DeWitt said he tried skeleton because it was there: in his backyard, at the Park City sports facility Utah built in hopes of securing the Winter Olympics.

“I thought, if I’m going to have to put up with all the hassles of the Olympics, I’m going to find some way to use this thing,” said DeWitt, 34. “There was this $25-million track in my backyard. It looked like a real cool toy and I wanted to play on it.”

A part-time ski instructor, sometime computer programmer and fanatic mountain bike racer, DeWittand a friend went 50-50 on used skeleton equipment. He stared down the track the first time, thinking the sheet ice made it look like a very steep mirror. For a moment he thought maybe this was not such a good idea. Then down he went.

“I stepped off the track, looked at my friend and said, ‘Do you think we can still get refunds on our season ski passes?’ ” DeWitt said. “It was just so exciting, and it didn’t kill me.”

As a child in Granville, Ohio, Parsley played soccer and was the quarterback on her flag football team. She attended college on a basketball scholarship, then earned two additional degrees in nursing.

One day, friends invited Parsley to Lake Placid, N.Y. She spotted a skeleton sled and said: What’s up with that thing? Soon she was competing at the World Cup. She is ranked fourth in the world among women.

Parsley, whose pale blue eyes and dark hair make her look something like Liv Tyler, takes pride in feeling that she is on an athletic frontier.

“You’re not necessarily a pioneer, but you’re at a unique time in the history of the sport,” she said. “We’re hoping that after thegames, we’ll get a ton of young women coming out. “

Shea had a special incentive to find a winter sport that suited him. His dad, Jim Shea Sr., competed in Nordic skiing in the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Jack Shea, Jimmy’s late grandfather, won two gold medals in speed skating in the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid--where he is credited with helping to turn that village in upstate New York into one of the world’s great winter sports centers.

Before 91-year-old Jack Shea was killed last month by a drunk driver in Lake Placid, the three men stood to set a record of their own, as the first family ever to produce three generations of Olympians.

That distinction has won Jimmy Shea more attention than any other U.S. skeleton slider. Shea, 33 and No. 5 in the world in overall rankings, was one of the first sliders to hire an agent to cash in on televised product endorsements.

Shea’s mother put him on skis when he was 2. For a time he skated with a junior hockey team. Then he tried bobsled, two-man and four-man, but got bored. In 1995, he took up sliding at Lake Placid.

The image of skeleton as a finesse sport--relying more on the athlete’s body and brain than on equipment--appealed to Shea immediately. For a kid who always liked to do things like jump off cliffs, the head-spinning speed of skeleton was a perfect fit.

“I don’t do anything that’s totally unsafe,” Shea said. “Although it’s crazy, what I consider safe.”

Days after his grandfather’s death, Jimmy and his dad organized the Shea Foundation in Jack Shea’s honor. Its purpose, the younger Shea said, is to provide training, encouragement and equipment for young athletes. Skeleton, of course, will be among the opportunities.

“This is a great outlet for crazy kids to burn off some high adrenaline, and do it safely,” Shea said.

Even among extreme sports, skeleton boasts a maverick image. Sliders may be fiendishly competitive, but they also think of themselves as members of a club whose ticket for entry is steel guts. At races, opposing teams often stay in the same motel. Frequently they eat and drink together.

And here is the ultimate scary thought about skeleton: Practitioners of this odd and obscure sport believe it is on the brink of widespread popularity.

“There are parents all over the world who stick their 8-year-old kids in tennis camps with the intention of creating tennis monsters,” Davenport said. “Skeleton isn’t to that point. Skeleton will eventually get to that point.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Facts, Figures on Skeleton

Here’s the lowdown on skeleton:

Best body type: slim upper frame, sturdy legs

* Sled length:: 31.5 to 47.25 inches

* Sled weight: 94.8 pounds for men; 77.2 pounds for women

* Number of U.S. sliders: about 200

* Number worldwide: 800-1,000

* How to steer: dragging feet and shifting weight

* Hardest part: avoiding skinning knuckles or crushing shoulders.

* How you win: fastest combined time of two runs.

* The track: Usually an iced-over cement floor.