The Chronicles of Davetron

Ow II, Return of the Booboo

2006-02-21T18:29:00.000Z

You'll have to excuse my lack of postings over the past 2 weeks. As you can imagine, I've been extremely busy at the Games. I'll try do a few posts to cover events leading up to the present.

I'll pick up where I left off, training in Altenberg. My secret weapon worked out quite well. The track was super fast, exactly as I had planned, and sharpened me up nicely. By the time I got to the Torino track it wasn't very intimidating at all. In fact by the end of official training I was starting to really enjoy the track. It became more of a challenge than an ordeal. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so much to tell.

After training in Altenberg, Chris and I drove down to St Moritz for some last training runs. On the way we stopped off in Munich to change our car for a big BMW X5 jeep. Clifton had some concerns about us having enough space for all our sleds and not being able to get to the competition venue in the event of heavy snow so X5 is was. Very big and comfy with a big engine to match. It also looks pretty flash, so we didn't feel like scruffy scumbags driving around St Moritz. Ironically it doesn't have much boot space but it was so comfy we weren't gonna complain.

Training was going pretty well in St Moritz just when fate decided to step in. On the last training run of the last day of training disaster struck. The skies clouded over, animals fled the area, quakes rumbled the land, statues wept blood and I stepped in too close to my sled whilst loading onto it. I hit the small metal bumper on the rear of my sled and split my heel wide open through the back of my shoe.
Twenty minutes later I was in Klinik Gut being examined by some very clean and efficient looking swiss doctors. I was extremely fortunate not to have hit the achilles tendon, that would have put me out of any sport for the next 18 months. As it was I got 4 stitches in the heel. It was stiff and sore but I had to hope that it would heal somewhat in time for my Olympic competition ten days away.

I think we all knew it was going to get worse before it got better. Upon arrival in the athlete's village in Torino I went straight to the Poly-clinic to get it checked. All seemed ok, I'd burst one of the stitches but nothing too serious. I knew there was some serious swelling on the way so I asked for some anti-inflammatories and was given panadol. Um, thanks, panadol. World reknowned for it's healing properties...of headaches. My italian was good enough to say ciao bella and his english was good enough to ask me for an Ireland pin so that's as far as that treatment went. We did the Welcoming Ceremony (more on ceremonies later) and headed up to the athlete's village in Sestriere, my home to be for the next couple of weeks.

Those who watched the opening ceremony may have seen me walking like a normal Olympic athlete but I can assure you I was strapped up and running on pain-killers and national pride. The following morning I couldn't even see where my ankle was amidst all the swelling and walking was impossible. Fortunately for my Olympic endeavour we had been assigned assistants, one of whom took me back to the poly-clinic in Sestriere. A combination of her translating skills and extreme boredom on the part of the staff there got me a completely different reaction to the one down in Torino. I spent three hours in the clinic being treated by no less than 14 doctors, got an MRI scan, all manner of electro-magnetic physio treatment, a prescription for antibiotics and some serious anti-inflammatories. That picture above is part of the scan on my foot. The light area to the right is the fluid and swelling on the inside of my right ankle. Not pleasant at all.

Over the next week or so I basically spent all my time between my room, the dining hall, the skeleton track and the poly-clinic. It is a credit to the body's power of healing and the good work of the physiotherapists that my ankle began to heal rapidly. It wouldn't be 100% in time but it would be workable.

Back to the Grindstone

2006-02-08T14:16:00.000Z

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame, I've just finished enjoying mine.
After qualifying for the games it appears that everyone is suddenly interested in me.
I came home for a few days last week, killing several birds with one stone.

The main reason was to take a couple of days off sliding to see my family so I wouldn't be all burnt out going into the olympics. It takes it's toll on you and as any good athlete will tell you, recovery is an important part of training.

The second reason was to do some athletics training to sharpen up a little. It was nice to do a session on the track again after so many months away. It's practically impossible to do proper speed training while away, there are very few good gyms to be found, and even fewer athletics tracks.
The club I train with is called DSD and it has played a very large part in my qualifying success. When I'm not doing skeleton I'm can ususally be found training with some excellent athletes, namely Dave, Andy, Lorcan, Ross, Avril and Zeta (Hi guys) and being coached by Jim and Lucy.

The third reason was to collect the Olympic gear that I have to wear for the Games. Some sharp negotiator managed to get Columbia to give us stuff to wear in the Olympics. That must have been really hard work. They may even have had to hand over a few first born children. Wow. Can you imagine how hard it must have been to convince them of the benefits of people wearing columbia gear on a sporting event watched by billions? Can you tell I'm being sarcastic?
I can't help but feel a little resentful that we only get the gear once we've qualified. I've already spent hundreds on my own gear, where were they when I needed them? I don't particularly like fair weather friends. To top it off, I suspect that the Columbia gear isn't as warm as the generic stuff I already use. All the labels talk about is breathability and waterproofness. Erm, yes that's all very well but it's the Winter Olympics, not the Water Olympics. Oh well.

The fourth reason was to take care of all the media attention that had sprouted up overnight, kind of like mushrooms. A few radio interviews, some tv stuff and a few newspaper interviews seemed to cover everything. I've been told that I come across quite well, which is a surprise since I consider myself to be a bit of a mumbler. Anyway, the masses have been informed of my presence.

On saturday, the limelight was switched off and it was back to the grind-stone. I travelled out to St Moritz to resume training and took part in a small local competition on Sunday morning. My mojo still seems to be in place and mojofying correctly, I came 2nd in the competition amongst a load of people competing on their home track.

I originally intended to stay in St Moritz and train there until just before the Games start. I really, really, really love the St Moritz track, in a platonic sense. It's fast, it's smooth, it's exhilarating, it's beautiful. It's like a giant highway of a track, big sweeping corners, wide straights with loads of room to correct before you go into a corner. You get big speeds on this track, I hit 130kph on monday. The only problem is that the track is too easy, and I don't want to get lazy going in the Olympics.

That's when I decided to use my secret weapon. Altenberg. That fast, mean track up in northern Germany. The ice is really built up on it at the moment, making it particularly fast and mean. Chris (my new coach for the Games) and I travelled up to Altenberg on monday. I got 6 runs down it yesterday and even the messy runs were super quick. After St Moritz it seemed like every corner was coming at me too damn fast. It was almost like my first time down on a sled. But I got used to it and therein lies the true power of my secret weapon.

All tracks are fast, usually getting you well up over 100kph, but some seem faster than others. While St Moritz gets you up to 130kph, it doesn't really feel like it because the track is so smooth, the corners are so big and you don't have to do much steering. In altenberg you only get up to about 110kph but it seems like a hell of a lot more because the corners are sharper, closer together and you've got to work them pretty damn hard lest they toss you like a rabid dog. What's really interesting is when you go from a difficult track to an easier track. The easy track seems even easier. Your reflexes, used to being pushed to their limits, now feel like they have an eternity to ponder the corner you're in. Hopefully when I get to Torino, it'll seem like the proverbial walk in the park ... at 120kph.

The plan at the moment is to head down to Torino on Thursday morning, get settled into the athletes village, then walk the walk in the Opening Ceremony on Friday night. On impulse I bought a load of little stuffed leprechauns in the airport on the way over. Despite my best efforts they wouldn't tell me where they keep their crocks of gold so I'm going to resort to throwing them to people as I walk around the stadium, maybe they'll have better luck.

National Anthem

2006-01-26T09:27:00.000Z

As you may recall in my explanations of Olympic qualification, I needed to finish in the top 8 of the Challenge Cup. So, just to make sure, I went ahead and won the whole thing. Better safe than sorry, you see. To be more specific I came joint first but that's a minor detail that doesn't preclude the fact that I've qualified for the Olympics.

After all the preparation and after doing so well in training I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to do it on race day. How wrong was I. Instead I pushed faster than I'd ever pushed and slid faster than I'd ever done before. Everything came together, I almost forgot that it was an Olympic qualifier, all I wanted to do was go so fast I'd destroy every other athlete. I was quiet and smooth on the sled, correcting mistakes almost before they'd even happened. I can't describe what it feels like to think and slide that fast, I don't think I'll ever forget it.

I took 5 hundredths off my push time and half a second off my downtime with a 49.47s. No-one else even got below 50 seconds. By the time the two heats of the first race were done, I'd finished over a second clear of everyone else. When races are normally won by tenths, that's devastating.

The second race was plagued by snow. I hate sliding in snow, it makes things a bit of a lottery. Generally the better sliders will be faster but occasionally novices can get caught in clear lines and get a fast time. And even the good sliders can get caught by snow drifts building up in the track. I was in the lead after the first heat which means I go off last in the second heat. With about 3 people to go, a blizzard descended and the roulette wheel was set spinning. On the way down I was steering for clear patches of track but it wasn't good enough and I dropped to third place. Annoying, but inconsequential, I'd done enough to finish joint first and earn my place in the Olympics.

My first ever podium was very enjoyable. Only a few weeks before we'd been joking that they'd have a hard time getting hold of the Irish National Anthem if we ever won anything, but they surprised us and got an accurate version of it, although it definitely the slowest version I've ever heard. I was sharing the podium with Tyler and after all the training we've done together I can't think of a more fitting result.

Calm Before the Storm

2006-01-21T08:03:00.000Z

It's 8:30am, Race Day. I've just had a good night's sleep and woken up with a few butterflys in my stomach (I thought that tortellini tasted strange last night...). For reasons unknown, someone tried to call me at half one in the morning. Fortunately for me I had my phone on silent so their diabolical plans of sleep-deprivation failed.

I have spent the past few days doing pretty much the best preparation possible. Paying particular attention to sleeping well, eating correctly, stretching etc...
Official training has gone brilliantly, I brought my personal best yesterday down to 49.97s and have probably been the most consistent slider.

It's looking good but training doesn't mean anything, only the races matter. I've got to keep that pedal to the floor and, as my pal Loc says, push that NOS button when it's time to shine.

Storm's a comin'.

That Which is Measured, Improves

2006-01-17T21:31:00.000Z

I first encountered the phrase "That which is measured, improves" while working as an intern in Sun Microsystems. There we were benchmarking the Solaris operating system. If something dropped in performance we could work to pin-point it and remedy the situation. That way we ensured that the OS kept getting better with every iteration.

The same process is applied to sports. People always find a way to quantify their performance. A weightlifter has a maximum weight that they've lifted. A sprinter has a best time over 100m. A golfer has their farthest drive. These measurements are the current limit that have been encountered. They set a boundary on what you know you should be able to do again because if you've done it once, you can do it again.

The ultimate aim of this is to push the boundary out again and again until it's further out than anyone else has ever been. Lift heavier, run faster, drive the ball further, slide faster. It's not always possible or realistic to break world records.
I'm a sprinter, but I doubt I'll ever get below ten seconds for the 100m. What that means is that I have to instead look at my own boundaries. I may not ever break the world record but I still relish the feeling of breaking my own personal best.

I've just come from training on the Igls track in Austria. My best time on the track for the last two years has been 55.32 seconds. Yesterday afternoon I took that down to 55.03s.

I wasn't really expecting it but in hindsight it's probably the best thing that could have happened to me. It's a real confirmation that I'm sliding better than I ever have. This confidence is the best way to be going into the most important competition of my life. Official training for the competition starts tomorrow. Five days til I D-Day.

Incidentally, above is a picture of what a one-handed start looks like.

My Heroes

2006-01-15T17:48:00.000Z

When I hear the word hero, my immediate reaction is to think of a super-man like figure. Mercurial, strong, infallible. Rubbish. When I think about it some more, I realise some of the greatest heroes didn’t necessarily succeed. I’m going to tell you about two of them.

Ireland has a women’s bobsled team made up of two sisters, Siobhain and Aoife Hoey. They are extraordinarily talented athletes and have been so all their lives. They originally came from track and field, winning many national titles and holding various records along the way. I’ve seen large boxes overflowing with medals and trophies. And they are just the one’s they bothered bringing down from the attic. They didn’t just get there by gifted genetics, they worked hard for it.

Over the past eight years Siobhain has been involved in bobsled, representing Ireland in the brakewoman position. That’s the person at the back providing the main push when starting a bobsled. More recently Aoife has joined her as a driver. I don’t need to explain that one.

Through this, Siobhain has managed to juggle working as a teacher and being one of the best brakewomen in the world. She is also the Treasurer of the Irish Bobsled and Skeleton Association, as well as the person who got me involved in Skeleton.

Top-level sport is quite difficult. I don’t believe many people actually think about the work that goes on behind the scenes. The thousands and thousands of hours of preparation and training that are needed to compete on an international level. Support is a very important part of this preparation. An athlete needs to be able to concentrate on doing exactly what they need to do in order to win. Imagine how long it would take to fly anywhere in an aeroplane if the pilot had to check everyone’s luggage, load it on the plane, issue tickets, fill the plane with fuel, make sure all the other planes were cleared out of the way for takeoff, then actually fly the damn thing.

In an ideal world, Siobhain and Aoife would be able to concentrate on their training. If one got injured, she would have physio on hand to get her fixed up asap. They wouldn’t have to worry about booking flights, accommodation, entering competitions, insurance, arranging sled transport, van rental. They would have a team manager to organise all of that. The sled and its steel runners would be cared for and maintained perfectly by a sled technician. They would have a dedicated speed and strength coach to ensure that they are strong and fast in the crucial push start. They would have a track coach to teach Aoife how to steer the sled through the fastest lines down the track. They would have a good sled provided for them. They would have the support of a well-funded national organisation.

Instead, they must do all this by themselves. And when they’re done, they must try to compete against nations that live in an ideal world. And compete they did, against all the odds. They bought a new sled for this season. Paid the E10,000 out of their own pocket, despite promises of support from certain organisations that then later feigned ignorance. The sled was late being made, and turned out to be slower than their older one. During transport to a training week in Europe, it went missing for a few days, making them miss the training. During push training in Canada, Siobhain cut her ankle on the runners, requiring minor surgery and slowing down her push. Aoife has to make do with a shared small-nations coach and she still drives better than half the other nations on the World Cup circuit. Despite remaining drug-free they compete against women that are so manly, their beard growth is matched only by their girlfriend’s and their legs are thicker than most rugby players I’ve seen. And still they compete.

You might remember my explanation of how World Cup skeleton athletes accumulate points by winning races and how the top nations get to go to the Olympics. It’s the same for bobsled. Last night Siobhain and Aoife competed in the last World Cup race for Olympics qualifying. They were so close, only one place away from being able to walk into the Olympic stadium to represent their country. The single greatest honour an athlete can ever have. They didn’t make it.

I was there to watch and help with the sled. They knew as soon as the run was finished that it wasn’t good enough. The push wasn’t quite fast enough, the drive not quite quick enough. It was over. I could only watch helplessly as the adrenaline wore off them to make way for the inevitable realisation that they had not made it to the Olympics. Slowly the tears came and there was nothing else to do. They had given everything, strained every last muscle and sinew, given every last penny, sweated every last drop of blood, and it still hadn’t been enough.

But had they failed? There is a qualitative difference between someone who nearly climbs to the top of Mount Everest and someone who reads about it in a book. Just because they didn’t make it to the very top doesn’t mean they didn’t climb the other 8000 metres. A good friend of mine recently told me that people are defined by what they achieve, not what they don’t. Just because Siobhain and Aoife didn’t qualify for the Olympics doesn’t alter the fact that they are amongst the best athletes in the world. It doesn’t erase all those competitions where they represented Ireland. It doesn’t make all the friends they made on the way disappear. What’s more, their achievements are all the more spectacular because they did it by themselves with hardly any help from anyone. If anyone should to be in the Olympic stadium carrying the Irish flag, it’s them. When I’m there I’ll imagine they’re walking beside me, where they deserve to be in an ideal world.

Shenanigans

2006-01-15T17:37:00.000Z

Ignore this post if you don’t like rants.

After the competition in Austria it was a quick blast on the Autobahn up to Konigssee for a bit of push training. Push training is just done on a small 80m track behind the track proper. As the name indicates, it's just training for the push at the start of a run. The track proper is extremely busy at the moment. There was the Luge world cup there last week, the Bavarian Championships today and the Bobsled and skeleton world cup all next week. As soon as that's finished there's the Challenge Cup (my Olympic qualifier). As I said, the track is super busy. No extra sliding time available for anyone.

Or so we thought.

Somehow certain people have managed to get extra training time. In little half hour slots after each world cup session for the next week. That's quite a bit of extra practice on a track that will get you into the Olympics if you're good enough on it. It seems that nearly every week I read stories about some student or other getting in trouble about posting comments about teachers or fellow students. I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are for me, but as a member of the Irish skeleton team I suppose I should show some decorum. Consequently I'm not going to name names. I'm just going to assign initials at random. At Random.

So, Mr A and Mr G are enjoying their training and gradually getting better at this oh-so-important track. Which is great. I don't have a problem with people putting effort in, working hard and reaping the rewards. What I do have a problem with is when other people are denied the opportunity to put the effort in, work hard and reap their own rewards. While Mr's A and G are happily sliding away, there are several other people who have been told that they can't slide on the track.

Does that sound a little unfair to you? It sure does to me. And this is just icing on the cake. Some background info needed here. Tyler, the South African we train with, needs to do three competitions on three separate tracks in order to compete in the Challenge Cup. He already had two tracks done, but was left without the third when the competition in Altenberg was cancelled due to adverse weather conditions in the form of tons and tons and tons of snowfall. Tyler was entered in the race, was there for the little competition training that wasn’t cancelled and possibly could have done quite well in the race. So it would be a bit unfair to exclude him from the Challenge Cup simply because there was too much snow at another competition. The FIBT, following a precedent already set a couple of years ago, have officially credited him with the race so that he may compete in the Challenge Cup. It’s important to note that Tyler still needs to qualify to the Olympics through the Challenge Cup. He hasn’t been handed anything on a platter, only the chance to compete fairly.

More background info. Tyler is an extraordinarily talented slider. I will be genuinely shocked if he doesn’t finish in the top 8 in the Challenge Cup. Now imagine, if you can, that Tyler wasn’t competing in the Challenge Cup. That means he wouldn’t be taking up one of the qualifying places. In turn that means someone in 9th place would be able to qualify. Well, would you be at all surprised if I told you that someone in that very position is objecting to the FIBT crediting people with the race in Altenberg. I’ve even heard that someone is going as far as to take the issue to some arbitration court. Interestingly it’s also the same person who has managed to get extra training on the Konigssee track, while excluding others who also need it. I don’t believe for one second that the FIBT will back down on their decision. It’s the only fair decision.

As I said, I’m not going to name names. I don’t have to. You will be able to see the name for yourself. Just go to www.fibt.com later this month. Have a look at the results for the Challenge Cup. If there is any justice in the world you will see the name just outside qualification for the Olympics. Preferably by as small a time margin as possible to make the justice even sweeter.

Let this be a lesson to anyone looking to get involved in sport at international and Olympic levels. When the stakes are this high, people show their true colours and will screw each other over at the drop of a hat.

Challenge Cup

2006-01-09T16:32:00.000Z

What do you guys think of the new logo I half came up with for our team? I’ll have to change it a bit to avoid getting sued to death by the company that came up with the tshirt that gave me the idea. There’s a photo of the tshirt below it.

Anyway, in an effort to make my posts more reader-friendly, I’m attempting to make things a bit shorter. In this snippet I’m going to explain how I qualify for the Olympics. It’s done through the Challenge Cup, a competition which takes place this year in Konigssee, Germany.

Here's how the Challenge Cup works. In the world of skeleton there are two levels of competition.
First is the World Cup, which tends to be populated with the larger nations like USA, Canada, Germany, Austria, UK etc. Think of it as the Premier League.
Second is the Europa and America's Cups which is like the First Division. It's for all the small nations people, like Ireland, Slovakia, Brazil, Lebanon, Bermuda etc.

During the season the World Cup nations do their competitions and accumulate points depending on how well they do. They are ranked according to these points. The top 12 nations get to send people to the Olypmics so they're happy.

The other 4 nations aren't happy because they have to come down to the Challenge Cup and compete with the riff raff smaller nations. Just like relegation in football. In the Challenge Cup the top 8 individuals get to go to the Olympics. These places must be filled with 8 different nations. So, if the top 8 individuals are from different nations they all get to go. If, for example, there are two Irishmen in the top 8, only one of us gets to go to the Olympics, and whoever is in 9th place then qualifies.

Last year, I was only one place outside of qualification. I’m sliding over a second quicker this time round. The others have improved, but not that much. I just have to do it on race day, 12 days away.

A Pleasant Surprise

2006-01-09T14:08:00.000Z

Well, happy new year to everyone who bothers looking at this blog. Haven't put up a post for a while, I was extremely busy over Christmas, eating and sleeping. Had to be done.

To bring you up to speed: During the training week in Konigssee, just before Christmas, I continued to improve and brought my best time on the track down to 49.99 seconds. That's really really fast. Admittedly the ice was quite quick that day, but it shows I was able to put it to good use. If I can keep sliding like this on race day, I think I'll make it to the Olympics, which would be nice.

After a short week home, I flew out at 7:10am on New Years day to Austria to resume training. We were just there for a few days but we managed to pack it in. Forerunning for the British Championships, then taking part in the Austrian Championships. I came second in the guest class of the Austrian Champs and netted a rather nice trophy. We weren't expecting any medals or anything, maybe a mars bar and a pat on the back. Then after they'd given the natives their medals they hauled us up and gave us trophies. Sweet.

I didn't have my camera on me at the time so I've drawn what I believe to be an accurate representation of what the ceremony looked like.

Snow Patrol

2005-12-17T14:50:00.000Z

Ok, we were supposed to be doing a competition here in Altenberg but because it decided to snow so damn much the race has been cancelled.
I'll explain how racing works. There are official training runs that take place in the couple of days leading up to a race. There are supposed to be 6 training runs available of which you must successfully complete at least 3 to be able to do the competition. The reason for this is two-fold: It gives you a chance to re-familiarise yourself with the track if you haven't been on it recently, and it weeds out those that may not be able to handle the track safely when it has been specially prepared on race day and it is lightning fast.

The race itself consists of two heats. There is some seeding that takes place in a race draw that determines the order in which competitors go off in the first run. The fastest 25 from the first heat get to do a second heat in the order of slowest to fastest. For example, last week I was 21st in the first heat, which meant I went off 4th in the second heat. Your final time is the combination of your first heat and your second heat and this determines your final placing. It is obviously possible to gain or lose ranking during the second heat if you have a great second run, or if you mess it up.

Our race cancellation started off innocuously enough with a training session being cancelled. Then another. A last ditch proposal to have one training run on the morning of the race, then the race in the afternoon was further diminished to having one training run on the afternoon followed immediately by a one-run race. Finally it was all cancelled. Stupid snow.

Tyler and I made an expedition to the track office to collect our licences. On the way we saw complete chaos on the roads. Despite being an ass-crack town, Altenberg lies on one of the major trucking routes between Germany and the Czech Republic. Steep roads, heavily laden articulated trucks and copious amounts of snow are a recipe for … some sort of weird disgusting disaster cake. Trucks being towed by special recovery trucks that must have more horsepower than a tugboat and more grip than a gorilla with glue on his hands. Trucks stuck on the side of the road cos they can’t get any further up the hill, even with chains on.

We also nearly had some tree fall on our car, which required us to manually lift it out of the way. Apparently being cold gives you enormous tree lifting strength. Don’t ask.

At this stage I'm not sure whether I’m annoyed or relieved. Altengberg is a love-hate track. It's mean and unforgiving to the bad slider. Sometimes it's mean and unforgiving to the good slider. You may recall how I recently said that on most tracks if you get on the sled and lie there like a sack of potatoes you'll get down without too much trouble, speed or injury. This is not one of those tracks.

There are two corners here that will make a serious, committed effort to fuck you up. The first is called Omega, most likely because it looks like an omega. It's a 180-degree left turn that likes to leave you high on the wall at the end of the corner. The corner has finished coming around at this stage so there is no pressure and it's not obliged to hold you up there. So it drops you out into the left wall, hard. Hard enough to bump you off the sled, or if you catch the beginning of the next corner it'll flip you over.

Omega is not nearly as tough as the other corner. It's called Kreisel. It's a standard name on most tracks for a corner that turns more than 180 degrees. This one in particular turns 360 degrees. What that means is that you're pinned to that wall as you hook around this huge corner that loops around right and curves back under itself. What makes it even better is that there is a long 60m straight leading into it so you've got plenty of speed when you come trucking into this corner. I remember the first time I saw it four years ago. We were doing a track walk with Andy Walser (Sled God who makes our sleds) and he summed up the corner nicely. "If you go in early, it's ok. If you go in late, you die". His English isn't great but he gets the point across.

Imagine a corner turning right. If you enter the corner on the left side it’s called getting in early. The resulting change of direction is smoother. If you enter it on the right side, it’s called getting in late and your change of direction will be very abrupt. If you enter Kreisel on the left you’ll experience a relatively gradual onset of pressure as the corner brings you around. If you go in late, all five G’s hit you in a split second, your head suddenly weighs five times as much as normal and you crack your jaw off the edge of your sled, or the track underneath, whichever is closer.

But that’s just the entry; the corner’s not finished with you yet. As the corner continues to come around, the pressure rises and falls. This makes the sled rise and fall so you get huge oscillations that you have to control as hard as you can. If you do it right you flatten out into 3 big waves. If you do it wrong you get a fourth wave that doesn’t just flip you, it gives you air time Michael Jordan would be proud of. I think pretty much everyone has flown out of Kreisel at some stage or another. I’ve put a video here so you can see what it looks like when it goes wrong. When it goes right it’s a great feeling and either way the remaining six corners are almost fun enough to make up for Omega and Kreisel.

On balance I’m probably just relieved, I didn’t actually need to do this race and there’s nothing to be gained from hurting myself on this track.

From here I’ve got a day or two off which are gonna be spent relaxing a bit with some of our American traveling companions. After that I’m heading to Konigssee for five days training before going home for Christmas on the 23rd December. I’m seriously looking forward to getting home. I’ve been away for two and a half months. It’s been fun and all but I’m not overly fond of German food or German beds. The former is too processed and the latter is too soft.

Mojo

2005-12-15T22:43:00.000Z

At the moment I’m in Altenberg, Germany. It’s a tiny little town near the east border that actually manages to surpass Konigssee as a true ass-crack town. There is one set of traffic lights here.

I’ve just come from a competition in Konigssee where I placed 21^st out of 69 entrants. That’s a good result and I’m happy with it for a number of reasons.

I took over half a second off my previous best time (that’s huge by the way).

I came close to beating my coach.

I beat my team-mate Patrick.

Following the international training in Torino and after making a few adjustments to my sled I seem to have gotten my mojo back. I’ve begun sliding better and better, much to my relief. I was starting to get worried there. Big thanks to everyone who had faith in me and took the time to tell me so. Every little helps when you’re doing your best and it’s still not working.

Over the years I've been doing skeleton I've gathered the impression that people think there's not much to it once you've done the push and loaded onto the sled. You just lie there like a brave sack of potatoes.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a lot of work to be done over the next 50 seconds. I'd say the sport is about 10% push and 90% driving. Sure, the push is helpful but it's no good to you if you can't drive. There's a Russian slider on the World Cup circuit at the moment. I can't remember his name right now but he is a seriously fast pusher. He holds the push record of nearly every track he's been to. But not the downtime records, and that's because he can't drive. By the time he gets to the bottom of the track he has lost so much time from bumps and skids that his awesome start is utterly wasted.

On the other hand look at someone like my coach, Clifton Wrottesley (Lord). He came fourth in the last Winter Olympics. He is an amazingly good driver and a not-so-amazing starter. If you have a slow start you can make up for it somewhat by being a good driver. During the course of his 2nd run in the Games, Clifton went from being 11th to 4th by driving the sled so well.

On most tracks, if you get on the sled and lie there like the aforementioned sack of potatoes you will probably make it down without too much trouble. You'll get bumped a bit, but you won't get seriously hurt, and you certainly won't get a fast time.

The sled you ride is about 70 cm wide, enough to accommodate your shoulders and a bit more for protection. The track varies in width from 1m to 5m. There's plenty of room and a huge huge number of lines you can take while going down the track. Some are easier to do, some end up hurting you, and some are definitely faster than others. What differentiates them all? Steering. You decide where the sled goes in the track.

If it were like driving a car it would be easy: “Oh, I want to go left here, I’ll just turn the wheel and it’s done “. Not so on a sled, and this is what makes it such a great sport. It’s not just the ability to swallow your fear and go head first at 80mph, it’s not just your athletic ability to do a fast push start. It’s also your ability to drive a sled that is difficult to drive. You need to have a complete awareness of where you are in a corner, what pressures you’re experiencing, whether the sled is rising or falling or skidding. And if you need to make adjustments they have to be done for fractions of a second at just the right moment.

But that’s not the hardest part. The hardest part is doing as little steering as possible. Steering is basically braking. The more steering you do, the more braking you do, the more speed you lose, never to be regained. That balance between doing too little and too much is a fine one.

When it all comes together it’s an amazing feeling that is difficult to describe. I’ve regained some of that feeling. It may sound stereotypical but it’s almost as if you are one with your sled, and not just because there are huge G forces pushing you onto it. When you pick up a glass of water you just do it. You don’t think about the individual movements involved like extending your arm, opening your hand, moving it around the glass, closing your hand. The nitty gritty details are taken care of on a deeper level that doesn’t register.

Every Journey ...

2005-12-07T18:53:00.000Z

There are two main parts to a skeleton race. The first is the push start, the second is the slide. Doing both in as little time as possible is the aim of the game.

The push start is pretty damn important, it's your chance to put as much speed into the sled as possible before gravity takes over. Imagine doing two runs down a track. On both slides you drive exactly the same, take exactly the same lines, the ice is in exactly the same condition. The only difference is that on the first slide you push off a tenth of a second quicker. All else being equal, that slide can be about three tenths of a second quicker by the time you get to the bottom. When a race can be won by thousandths of a second that's a pretty big difference.

Here's how it works:
At the top of the track there is a wide, wooden block set into the ice. There are two parallel grooves cut into the ice about a meter apart. The grooves are about the width and depth of your thumb and run from in front of the block for about 30 meters.

There are a series of timing eyes at various locations down the track, which are used to time your progress. The only ones that matter are the first one and the last one. Your time starts when you cross the first one and stops when you cross the last one.

The first eye is about ten meters away from the block so you have a bit of room to get into your stride. Once the track is cleared and the buzzer goes, you have 30 seconds to cross the first eye.

So, the buzzer goes, you clear your mind, think whatever you have to think, put the sled down on the ice with one runner in the groove and get it going.

There are a couple of ways of doing this. The traditional way is to stand to the left of the sled, put your left paw on the left saddle rail, your right paw on the right and away you go. I've put a few sequence photos below of my teammate Patrick doing a two-handed start in Lake Placid.

The newer and better way, incidentally the one I use, is a one-handed start. You stand to one side (doesn’t matter which), put your nearside hand on the nearest saddle rail and run like hell. That may not seem like a huge difference but remember we’re talking “hundredths matter” here. The reason one-handeds are better is purely a matter of biomechanics. You have one arm free to perform your normal running motion and, more importantly, you are free to run in a slightly more natural upright position.

The only reason not everyone is doing one-handed starts is because they’re harder to do. You only have one hand on the sled controlling it so you need relatively strong shoulders. You also need better core strength to control the sled while you’re running beside it. It’s also tricky when you go to load onto the sled.
It’s soooo easy to jump on with too much sideways motion. Do that hard enough and the sled will pop out of the groove, send you into the wall, skidding. It’s a horrible mess and you can pretty much forget getting a decent time after losing all that momentum.

Ghostbusters

2005-12-07T18:05:00.000Z

Time for a bit of culture. We're staying in Konigssee, Germany at the moment doing a bit of training and a competition. Around here they have a traditional festival take place on the 5th and 6th of December. I'm not too clear on what the origins are but Im going to take a wild, random stab in the dark and guess that its pagan. It's called something like Putenmalenlaufen and only happens here, although i suspect there are similar variations that take place around Europe.

The idea goes that during winter there arelots of evil spirits wandering about doing whatever it is that evil spirits do: giving people colds, making radio stations incessantly play every jingle-bell-ridden song they can get their sweaty hands on as soon as the clock ticks past midnight to the first of December. All reasonably explained as the doings of evil spirits. Coming up to Christmas people got into the "quick, Jesus is coming, everyone look busy" mood and decided to get rid of the evil spirits in a rather novel way. Ghostbusters hadn't been invented yet but that didn't stop those wily pagans.

Apparently evil spirits aren't very bright. If you dress up as a scary demon and make lots of noise the evil spirits get scared and run away. So what happens is you get several groups of about twenty people going around the town driving out the evil spirits. For several hours, starting around nine pm, these groups make circuits throughout the town centre as everyone comes out to watch and drink hot gluhwein. The group makes lots of noise shouting and ringing bells and rattling pots. As they go along they whip various bystanders to drive out the spirits. In doing so they also make you more fertile too.

There are two main types in the group. The central body is made up of guys wearing big costumes made out of straw with large bells attached to them. Floating around these guys are others dressed up with furs and wearing smaller bells. All of them are masked and all of them are carrying an assortment of whips lovingly made out of birch sticks bound together with traditional tennis racquet handle tape.

Normally you may think of Germans as reserved, efficient well-behaved people. But that's not the case during Putenmalenlaufen. These guys really get into it and I suspect large quantites of gluhwein help out here, along with the anonymity of a mask. They will go into restaurants and whip people as they dine. They'll grab girls, and smear black grease on their faces. After a while they'll take a break in some bar at a corner of the town, top themselves up with more booze and do it all again. They don't whip gently either.

While we were standing near the market square a group came by. Two of them made a bee-line straight for me and proceeded to drive out some evil spirits. I was wearing snow trousers so the first few hits didnt really hurt. My polite, manly stoicism served only to fuel their fervour so they upped their efforts until the whips broke. Fortunately I had positioned myself up against a large pillar which took most of the beating. Either way I feel very angelic and fertile so I guess it worked.

Ow

2005-11-30T17:45:00.000Z

Don't worry, that's not my leg there. I'm only illustrating a point cos photos of my bruises don't look cool enough.

I've just finished training on the new Olympic Track here in Italy.
It's been a very intense week. It started with a loooong drive.
Our rental car, while very nice, didn't have any winter tyres on it. Apparently we wouldn't need them until end of December at least. About one week later, when it started snowing about 3 feet a day, we decided to get winter tyres.

Actually, I can be a bit more acurate than that. We decided to get winter tyres one day after an evening training session.
Driving back down the track was ... interesting. Near the top of the track there are these big curves called S-bends. They're very big, and very open, no short wall needed to keep you in while the corner is flinging you up. Proceeding at about 2 miles an hour was going great until the car decided to head straight for the entrance to bend 2. While my disdain for Luge sliders is great, it doesn't extend to running them over while they are only 12 years old and innocently training on some German track in the middle of nowhere. Frantic wheel turning, pumping the brakes and soiling ourselves resulted in a less murderous course and a detour to Munich to get winter tyres.

On the way we discovered a few interesting things:

Firstly, rental companies can be quite nice sometimes, especially when they replace you're admittedly decent Peugeot 406 with a kick ass Audi A4 so you can have winter tyres.

Secondly, Konigssee to Torino via Munich is a hell of a long drive. About 12 hours in fact. I would heartily recommend the private jet alternative if you can. They don't need winter tyres for a start.

Thirdly, we came up with something we like to call Bahn-Casting. Our training group currently consists of three athletes. Patrick and myself representing Ireland, and Tyler Botha waving the South African Flag. Pat & I share one car and Tyler has his own. He also has an iPod with some rather cool tunes on it and an iTrip which basically broadcasts whatever the iPod is playing to a particular radio frequency so you can tune your car radio in on it and listen to it that way. We found that the iTrip has a range of about 30 meters, which means it's signal can be picked up while in another car. Now, driving within 30 meters of another car at 100mph may sound a bit silly, and it is, but Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix) is so good it must be shared. And who said the 30 meters couldn't be side by side?

We eventually arrived in Torino and proceeded to go about learning this new track that will be hosting the Olympics. I always think that learning a new track is the most involved and consuming aspects of skeleton. When you're in school and you have to learn something, like the method for finding the roots of an equation, you learn it because you're told to. You learn it because it will get you more points in the exams, in turn getting you a better university course and eventually earning you more money, making you a better little capitalist. That kind of abstraction isn't very motivational. Skeleton, on the other hand, is much more concrete. If you learn the track you will be fast, win competitions, get to the Olympics and girls will find you attractive. If you don't learn the track you will get seven shades of crap knocked out of you when you go down it. QED.

The learning process start with the sequence of turns. Before you even go down the track you must know if the next corner is a left or a right. Sounds simple but it's easy to reel off a sequence when sitting comfortably in a chair, not so easy when you're doing it for real. I like to break the track down into sections. All tracks have few key features that you can use to mark where you are. A big long straight, or a particular type of corner, something you can use to reset your place in the track. After a few runs you get to know the individuality of each corner and how it behaves. Like a home that is strange the first time you're in it, and eventually becomes familiar over the days, weeks and months you spend there.

Now it gets a bit more tricky. Next is the detail of what each corner does and it's relationship with the preceding and following corner. When you enter a corner it changes the direction you are travelling in. You've all been in a car when it changes direction. The faster the change of direction, the more you get pulled to the side. In skeleton this pulling is called pressure. When you get pressure in a corner the sled tends to rise and this leads to a few problems. The main one is that it changes the direction of the sled. Instead of a going straight through a corner, you end up being directed towards the roof or inside wall. Sometimes instead of just one pressure you get two, but that's not as tricky as one and a half pressures. Those can leave you high on the wall as the corner is ending and drop you on your side or flip you over.

The general principle is to steer down when you enter a corner. This flattens the wave, keeps you going straight enough and avoids big scary oscillations. The trade off is that steering is basically braking. This is a disgraceful oversimplification of things but I'm going to keep an explanation of steering to another post.

Anyway, the idea is to control the waves in such a way that each corner sets you up nicely for the next, smoothly and cleanly accelerating all the way down the track.

The Torino track is quite challenging. You need to concentrate 110% all the way down, and it's full of corners that are followed by turns going the same direction. They're quite tricky to get right, but that's for another post too. The main issue with the Torino track is bend 18. It's the second last corner, so you're going

quite fast, about 70mph. It also turns quite sharply so you get good pressure in it. Remember, pressure generally equals height. This is a one and a half pressure

corner. The problem with 18 is that there is a bit of roof coming down quite quickly towards the end of the corner, right about when you're coming up to meet it on the crest of the 2nd bit of pressure. In the space of the week we were at International Training there were a heap of nasty crashes. Some of the Italians, on their home track I hasten to add, suffered broken legs, hips and arms. Others were getting concussions, bruised rubs and general bruises. Last year, the first person to do Luge down the track was put in intensive care by 18 for a few days.

For the first few days here I was getting through 18 great. I'd enter the corner nicely, work with the pressures and get out safely and quickly. In a mean way I found it kind of amusing to see the vaunted Americans crashing out of it. They're usually so smooth, fast and un-ruffled. Don't misunderstand me, I know most of these guys at least to nod to and they're all super-nice people. Maybe it's an Irish thing but there's something obscenely satisfying to see that the best skeleton sliders in the world are human and make mistakes too.

Pride comes before a fall.

I failed to notice that the Americans were doing the upper part of the track really well and so were carrying huge speed into the bottom of the track. This changes all the pressures, the timing of steers gets shorter, it's just more difficult. Then one day I got the top part of the track right.
Everything came together, everything was quiet, smooth and accelerating all the way. I clocked over 74mph heading into corner 17. I was in 18 before I knew it, mistimed my steers. I had just
enough time to say "Wha.." and clench my teeth as I flew off the end of 18 onto my side. Vision dims as 19 scoops me back onto my sled off the ice. My ears ring with the huge hit my head's taken off the floor and my shoulder is strangely quiet as it tries to come to terms with what I just did to it.
That ice may look smooth but it is certainly not when felt through a tshirt and a speed suit at 70mph. A quick self assesment while I trundled up the outrun reassured me I hadn't broken anything, or bitten off anything else. Fortunately I was wearing armour pads on my triceps although the top of my shoulder took a nice scrape. I hit hard enough to push the left side of my saddle out by an inch or two and my left shin has picked up a few nice bruises.

You might think I'd be a bit miffed, but I'm not. I didn't break any bones, my saddle can be knocked back fairly easily and I took over a second off my previous best time in the process.

Yes, we are all completely nuts.

The Story So Far

2005-11-22T21:53:00.000Z

Well after nearly a month of being too busy and being deprived of proper internet access I’ve finally gotten around to another post. To bring you up to speed, I finished up in Lake Placid and flew from Boston to London and on to Munich. That trip was a bit of an ordeal. In Boston the airline company, I won’t mention any names (coughAmericanAirlinescough), refused to take our sleds cos they were too heavy. The next half hour consisted of a combination of begging, pleading, reasoning and thinly veiled threats finally resulting in them graciously taking the sleds along with a generous overweight baggage fee.

Then we finally arrived in Munich we discovered that British Airways felt we didn’t really need anything as cumbersome as our luggage. It had been left in London. A three hour wait for the next flight made everything ok and we were on our way to Igls, Austria for the next stage of the Olympic journey.

Igls is a nice place. It’s just outside of Innsbruck and also where I first started Skeleton. The track there is easy enough to do safely but challenging to get fast times on. We were there to do some training and a Europa Cup competition, which is basically the European equivalent of the America’s Cup.

To cut a long, absent post short we slid well, got some good competition results and had a great time hanging out with a bunch of the American sliders who adopted us as their Lucky Charms. Everyone loves Irish people, it’s great. Now, if only I actually liked Guinness, I’d feel like less of a traitor.

Anyway, after Igls I headed over to Konigssee, Germany for some more training. Konigssee is a pretty little town in the ass-crack of nowhere. In an effort to maintain it’s status as an ass-crack town, Konigssee refuses to offer any reasonable form of internet access. By reasonable I mean other than an internet café that opens only when you don’t need it and fails to work properly when you manage to catch unaware and open. The other alternative is to drive around with my laptop on the seat beside me scanning for unencrypted access points, pulling over when I get one, connecting to it and hoping they don’t look out their window and call the police. I don’t like doing that, hence my prolonged blog absence.

One of the things I enjoy most about skeleton is the surroundings of the tracks. They are all usually located in places where land is cheap and steep, which means mountainous areas and few houses around to spoil the scenery. Here’s the view I usually warm up to in Konigssee.

The track in Konigsse is also Very Important. Again, note the capital letters. This is the track that I need to be damn good on in order to qualify for the Olympic Games. I’ve been down this track more times than I care to remember, I’m usually quite good at it, which makes me confident that I can qualify for the Games.

Except for one thing…. I’m not driving that well on it at the moment. What’s worse, in a way, is that my team-mate Patrick has suddenly started sliding very well on this track. Better than me. On one level I’m happy for him, I’m not such a bad person that I can’t feel happy for someone when they do well.
On a darker, more private level, I’m furious. Not with him, but with myself for not being better, like I usually am. This whole thing would be great material for some film where our hero’s fate is undecided, even though we know, deep down, that it will all work out ok in the end. Will Karate Kid be able to win the tournament? We’re not too sure, it doesn’t look good, the cards are down, he’s hurt his leg. Except, this isn’t a film. The ending doesn’t have to be a happy one … it could be a Quentin Tarantino film. If I don’t slide better than I am, I won’t be going to the Games.

But don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s still time to improve, find that extra gear, squeeze that last bit of speed out of the corner. In the meantime there’s plenty of fun to be had. At the moment I’m in Sestriere, Italy preparing to do some training on the new Olympic Track. If I qualify, this is the one you will be seeing me on in three months. This track is Very Important Too. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Yay Capitalism!

2005-10-27T21:16:00.000Z

I'd arrived in Lake Placid, where it's winter, to start training for the Winter Olympics, and it had the audacity to not be snowy. Not a flake to be seen. Anywhere.
But that's now been resolved. We've had a heap of snow and our heap of junk rental car is showing it's mettle ... or lack thereof. It's a constant source of amazement to me how something can be built and obviously never tested. I'm not a perfectionist by any stretch of the imagination, but if I were to build a windscreen de-mister, I'd damn well make sure it worked. Every morning we go to the track for training. It's a fifteen minute drive, and we spend every moment of it hunched over like giant irish prawns, trying to peer out of our frosted windscreen as the car ineffectually huffs luke-warm air at the bottom 20 centimeters of glass.
Then when we get to track we have to drive to the top. Its an automatic car, and I really don't think it should give off a burning smell when we get up there. I'm pretty sure it's an automatic ...

At the other end of the product spectrum there is the phenomenon known as the iPod. I just got myself an iPod Nano. Tiny (thinner than a pencil), big (4Gb), black (not white), and utterly sleek (not chunky). The only complaint I've heard leveled at these lovely pieces of kit is that they can be scratched simply by looking at them.
So, after donning a blind fold, I carefully lifted it out of the box and proceeded to apply something called the Invisible Shield. I'm not sure why Apple don't cover their iPods with this in the factory but they sure as hell ought to. Apparently it was designed to protect the edges of military helicopter blades from chipping. I suppose that means my Nano will be safe if I decide to whirl it over my head at hundreds of miles per hour. It may even protect it if I look at it and do crazy things like put it in my pocket and listen to music! What remains to be seen is whether this amazing cover will still permit me to use the scroll wheel.

In other news sliding is going well enough. I'm back on my sled nearly a week now and I'm still on one piece. It's taking a while to get back into the habit of performing the various things that make you a good slider. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to focus on telling you all about some of those things, hopefully as I remember how to do them.

Into the Jaws of the Beast

2005-10-22T00:55:00.000Z

Today I’m going to talk about fear. We’ve all experienced it at some stage or another. Watching horror films, nearly stepping out in front of a moving car. It makes you feel sick. It’s a cold feeling in the pit of your stomach, a sour taste on the back of your tongue. It usually passes quite quickly; a horror film is only an hour or two long; a car blasts its horn and is gone in a few seconds. You move on with your daily life, think nothing more of it. But have you really thought about it properly? What is fear? (Rory, philosopher, help me out here) Where does it come from? In an evolutionary sense, how does feeling sick help you deal with sabre-tooth tigers? It doesn't! It's completely useless. It's probably some side-effect of having a heap of adrenalin dumped into your system.

Yesterday I did my first slide of the season. I hadn't been on a sled in nearly 8 months. I have new runners on my sled, and the track here in Lake Placid chewed me up and spat me out nearly every time I went down it two years ago. I'm not going to lie, I was as nervous as hell.

And that's when I start to think that fear is completely and utterly irrational. There is no immediate threat to my personal well-being. There are no cars or sabre-tooth tigers bearing down on me. All I have is an idea of danger, a vague image in my mind of something going horribly wrong, of someone standing in the track when I go down, of a corner flipping me into a girder. None of it is real. None of this should have any effect on me. But it does.

I feel sick, I can't stop pacing up and down. Fortunately for my cool, composed exterior no-one can see my stomach churning, and my pacing looks like I'm doing a warm up.
Then I actually do my warm up, put the upcoming slide to the back of my mind.

There are ten people sliding before me.
I put my speed suit and a couple of armour pads on.
Then nine people.
I lean forward, close my eyes and visualise a run down the track.
Then seven.
I put my spikes on. My heart rate is still elevated from the warm up, and it's not going down.
Then six.
I hop around some more to loosen up as much as possible
Then five.
I do another visualisation.
Then three.
I put my gloves on.
Then two.
My heart rate keeps rising, I take deep breaths, try to relax.
Then one.
I pick up my helmet, walk outside into the cold.

As the last person pushes off. I take my sled and carry it over to the start, resting it on one end behind the starting block. I stand and look down the track. The ice crunches under my spikes as I shift from one foot to the other. My heart is hammering, I breathe deeply and flick through the sequence of corners one last time in my mind.

I try to push the fear out of my mind. Make way for the single point of focus, the here, the now, and the 19 corners waiting for me below.

The green light comes on, the track is clear. I put my sled down, shift the runner into the groove and feel the fear surge like a last breaking wave.

Sixty-four seconds later its all over.

The fear is forgotten. God, I love this sport.

Coming to America

2005-10-19T17:25:00.000Z

Well the journey has started properly now.
After much last minute running around and general stress, I'm here in sunny USA. In case there's someone I haven't managed to recommend it to, check out www.orbitz.com. Bloody brilliant, got flights from Dublin - Boston - Munich - Dublin for $632. But there is something I love more than Orbitz. Something that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I think about it. It's cruise-control. The single greatest automobile invention since the wheel. Forget wankel-rotary engines, forget turbos, forget ABS, just get cruise-control.

Let me explain.
The drive from Boston to Lake Placid is something like 300 miles. The average speed limit on the roads covered is around 55mph.
300/55 ~ 5.5hrs of driving. Try tapping your foot for 15 mins and you'll get an idea of what it's like to have to adjust the throttle on a manual car for 300 miles. Cruise-control takes all that away and replaces it with a smooth, fuel efficient, foot saving alternative.

That's a lot of driving. I'm sure you could cut the trip shorter by the simple expedient of driving faster but there seem to be lots of highway troopers arounds. And not the sort that try to insert the word "miaow" into the conversation to mess with your head then let you go with a warning.

Anyway, we're here now in the Olympic Training Centre. It's a great facility that serves as a reminder as to why America tends to dominate every sport it looks at, except for rugby and football (or soccer as they call it here), and hurling, now that I think of. Okay, there are probably lots of sports it's crap at as a nation but that's cos it's not interested in them.

The OTC has got pretty much everything an athlete could need to excel. There is a canteen which is open from 7am - 9pm. It serves you as much food as you want and ensures that it is all healthy and good for you. There is a complete weights room with enough equipment to keep 30 athletes happy pumping iron. There's a physio there to analyse your techniques, injuries etc. It's got a gymnasium to run around in, do sprint training and all that.
It even has a giant treadmill with a skeleton sled attached to it so you can practise your push-starts. When I'm in Ireland, the best push-start training I can do is sprint with a short stick held to the ground to simulate running low with a sled. That's so pathetic I don't even do it, I just mentioned it as the only Irish alternative.

Most importantly (to me) it's got a really technical skeleton track about 15mins drive away. We start training on that track tomorrow. It's not an ideal track to start the season on but I'm told it's running a bit slow at the moment. We'll see ...