On the Slide
USA Luge seeks Vermont kids who like to go downhill fast B Y CHARL E S E IC H AC K E R
Evan Hausman with Junior National luger Gracie Weinberg of Middlebury at USA Luge Kids Day in Burlington
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You may be able to participate in a research study involving:
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11-week cognitive therapy or chronic pain education (free of charge) 3 MRI brain scans – before, after, and 4 months following treatment Financial compensation at the completion of the study
Who can participate? If you have chronic pain persisting for 12 months or longer and are 18-70 years of age, you may be eligible.
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SEVEN DAYS
10.09.13-10.16.13
SEVENDAYSVT.COM
PAIN? •
For more information and to determine eligibility, please contact Marcia A. Davis, Project Manager at (802) 847-8241 or email marcia.davis@vtmednet.org
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Do you suffer from chronic
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF CYNTHIA HAUSMAN
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W
hen the United States Luge Association brings its “Slider Search” clinics to Burlington this weekend, the sessions will enable the organization to demystify a sport that many Americans only hear about once every four years. But with its free mini-camp, USA Luge also hopes to scope out tomorrow’s talent. Developed in Switzerland in the late 1800s, the luge — not to be confused with bobsledding or the skeleton — is a small sled that can hold one or two people lying on their backs. Using downward pressure from their legs as well as handles inside the sled to steer, lugers slide feet first down an approximately 4000-foot-long ice track. In the sport’s highest echelons, they do so at speeds approaching 80 miles per hour. This weekend, they won’t go nearly that fast. In three-hour sessions on October 12 and 13, USA Luge recruitment manager Fred Zimny and several junior lugers will instruct children between the ages of 9 and 13 in the basics of the sport. Taking place on Locust Street by Calahan Park, the clinics will culminate in a chance for attendees to slide down a stretch of pavement on wheeled sleds, simulating the real deal. If any participants show promise, USA Luge may then invite them to try out for the junior development team in Lake
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Placid. That’s the first step to eventually competing at the international level, says Gordy Sheer, marketing director for USA Luge. Sheer himself competed in three Winter Olympics and won a silver medal at the 1998 Nagano games. “The Slider Search is a great opportunity to try something new. Beyond that, you get a free T-shirt,” he says. “And
IT’S A CHANCE TO OPEN THE DOOR TO WHAT COULD
POTENTIALLY BE A TRIP TO THE OLYMPIC GAMES. GO R D Y S H E E R
beyond that, it’s a chance to open the door to what could potentially be a trip to the Olympic games.” That’s not empty rhetoric: The Slider Searches are USA Luge’s primary recruiting mechanism, Sheer explains. Eighty percent of the U.S. luge team at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, he points out, was recruited through the clinics, which the organization has run for 28 years.
But even if they’ve been a boon for USA Luge’s numbers, Sheer admits that the clinics illustrate the challenge facing the niche sport, which must contend with more popular winter pastimes and has a limited legacy in this country. For the last 50 years, countries much closer to the sport’s origins — Germany, Austria, Italy — have regularly taken home Olympic gold medals. Unlike the governments in those countries, the U.S. government provides no funding to its Olympic teams. “It’s not like hockey or skiing where there is already an existing structure of high school teams, leagues or clubs. We need to go out and recruit,” Sheer explains. “The other challenge is that we don’t have a lot of facilities in which to train, so we have to go out and bring the sport to them. That’s what the Slider Search is, a way to help us remedy the fact, at least partially, that we have a limited number of facilities.” The U.S. has only three luge tracks: two at the former Olympic facilities in Park City, Utah, and Lake Placid, N.Y., and one at a winter-sports complex in Muskegon, Mich. The bobsled and skeleton also use the same stretches of ice. A further challenge, explains former luger and Burlington business owner Cynthea Wight Hausman (who will be blogging at the upcoming Sochi games