Adventures of a Skeleton Slider - Year 3

I talked with Wendy yesterday about what happened at the race, and it sounds like it was a total disaster, and political mess.  Some of the high- (or low-) lights of the National Championships in Lake Placid:

- There were no sled checks, spike checks or runner checks.  Certain athletes showed up late for the Parc Ferme and were allowed to race.  How can you have more controls for a club race than the national championships? 

- Apparently, the program director talked to certain Lake Placid-based sliders the night before the race and not others, giving them track tips and possibly some other info on what would and would not be checked, it's not a surprise that they did much better than the other athletes.

- Just a note that this is the third straight year that Nationals have been held in Lake Placid.  It's amazing how the USBSF always manages to find a reason not to hold it in Park City.  They usually claim that it would be too warm to hold it here, but two out of the past three years it's rained in Lake Placid, causing poor track conditions or cancelled races (2002).  Plus, there's nothing that says they have to have it at the end of the season.  Other sports have their nationals in January, then continue on with the regular season.

- I don't know if there was something new on the track or what, but the sheer number of crashes says that something was going on.  Walt apparently hit the wood so hard that he was unconscious for 12-15 minutes (amazingly enough, he held on to his sled and finished his run, but couldn't get up off of it, and started to slide back down the track before they grabbed him).  Curtis would have done the same except he went sideways into a curve feet-up instead of head-up.  Stokes rolled twice, Steve crashed once.  Tracy Anderson, after being totally overcome with emotion when she found she had tied for 8th in the seeding race, hit so hard in her first run that she had to bail on the rest of the competition.  Perhaps just for safety's sake, they should move the race next year.

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• #1 Comment from lpskeleton06 
  4/14/04 9:00 AM | Permalink

  I can assure you 90 % of what you heard is false...