Love The Nordic Combined, Though

I don’t get luge. Grown men put on skin tight outfits, lie down on their backs on a plastic sled that weighs 7 pounds, and hang on for a 90 mile per hour ride down an icy chute. I can see that as a thriller at Disneyland, but it just doesn’t seem like an “Olympic sport” to me.

Here’s the thing. There doesn’t seem to be much of a variable in this sport. Let’s look at the numbers. Felix Loch of Germany won the gold medal. His fastest run down the course was 48.161 seconds. His slowest of his four runs was 48.402 seconds. That is a difference of .234 seconds. That’s two hundred and thirty four one-thousandths of a second. Man, that is consistency. In reality, the human eye can’t see much difference. Only, I suppose, an electric eye trigger at the start and the finish could measure that difference. But for all intents and purposes, he made all four runs down the course in same amount of time.

I looked at other numbers. In the second of the four runs, for example, the difference between the lst place finisher and the 25th place finisher was just over nine-tenths of a second. Finishers two through twenty four were all less than nine tenths of a second apart.

That means one of two things. The 25 best lugers in the world are all about exactly equally good. Can that be possible? Or is it just that anyone can get on one of those sleds and cruise down there at about the same speed as the guy who won the Olympic gold medal. Certainly we learned that the 25th best luger in the world is only nine tenths of a second worse than the very best luger in the world. I actually heard one of the NBC commentators yesterday say this of the winner, Loch: “He has a commanding lead—almost three tenths of a second.”

The point is, when three tenths of a second is a commanding lead, and a sport’s winner and losers have to be measure in thousandths of a second, there is no apparent difference between them. There’s not much of a human element involved. It’s about coating a tunnel with ice and putting a plastic sled on it. I guess the reward is for being brave enough to fly down that tunnel at 90 mph. I don’t think much of that kind of a sport.

I used to careen down Water Tower Hill in Hettinger on my Radio Flyer sled at about ten miles per hour, I’d say, and that was plenty fast for me. But at least my sled had a steering mechanism, and I was facing forward so I could see where I was going, so I had some control—there was a variable involved. Just laying down on my back and letting the sled go where it wants to seems pretty exciting to me, I guess, and a little dangerous, but not a sport of Olympic caliber.

Quote of the Day

“I timidly like Hoeven, but cannot support him enough for a vote in November. He is too progressive for me.”

That’s from a letter to the editor I saw in some newspaper over the weekend. Forget Governor Hoeven, and the politics here, and take a trip with me far back into the Dark Ages, when we did not have to worry about our leaders being progressive. And when we were not ashamed to tell the whole world we were afraid of progress. Today, just coincidentally, is the birthday (1564) of Galileo Galilei, who became the most famous public defender of Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism—the theory that the sun, not the earth, might be the center of the universe. Scary thought. Don’t tell that letter writer.