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Me Olympian! Sort of. (page 3)
Stricken with Olympic fever? Can't make it to British Columbia?
You can still get your five-ring fix.
By Lisa Gregoire with photography by Nancie Battaglia
Leo got to handle a rifle in Lake Placid too, another thrilling first. Biathlon always seemed like an odd sport to me — ruining a perfectly good workout by
shooting a gun — but hunting and soldiering on skis has existed for centuries and the combination of skills required is intriguing. Skate skiing is
hard enough, as the Covidien boys discovered, but stopping and dropping to focus on five targets,
4.5 centimetres in diameter and 50 metres away, as your lungs gulp oxygen and your heart pounds blood,
requires Zen-like mind control and fierce endurance. At least that's what Rick Costanza tells us. He’s
teaching us how to fire the .22 caliber rifle at rest, with our boots on. Much easier.
“Take three breaths and before exhaling that third breath, fire,” says Costanza, a former competitive
biathlete. “People who are really high-strung struggle with this sport. You have to practice relaxing.”
(Practice relaxing. Now that’s my kind of training.) He demonstrates the prone position — legs splayed,
hips flat on the mat, elbow planted and pivoting. I get three of five targets, more than some of my Covidien
confreres, and am feeling cocky, as usual. But I cheated by resting the barrel on a chunk of wood rather than on my weak, shaky palm.
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TO JACK SHEA’S HOMETOWN
Getting there
Drive from Montréal (2.5 hours), Ottawa (3.5 hours) or Toronto (6.5 hours) or fly into one of
three major airports at Albany, N.Y., Burlington, Vt., or Montréal, then rent a car from there. All
are within a 2.5-hour drive of Lake Placid. You can also connect to the Adirondack Regional
Airport at Lake Clear, 25 kilometres from town.
Staying there
Lake Placid offers a huge range of bed and breakfasts, cabins, motels, hotels, condos
and resorts such as Wildwood on the Lake and the Crowne Plaza Resort and Golf Club, a luxurious
hotel that boasts a vaulted, wood-beamed common room with a fireplace, bar, couches and
floor-to-ceiling windows. A clearing house of information can be found at www.lakeplacid.com and
www.skilakeplacid.com.
Playing there
The Olympic Regional Development Authority is your prime source for Olympic-style activities
and attractions, including corporate challenge packages. If it’s downhill skiing you’re after,
check out www.whiteface.com. You can also snap on crosscountry skis and ply the
50-kilometre Jackrabbit Trail, which goes through Lake Placid, or drive to the Cascade Cross
Country Center in town, which boasts 20 kilometres of groomed trails, inexpensive dorm-style
lodging and a rustic licensed lounge. Find cross-country ski links in the “what to do” section
at www.lakeplacid.com.
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They won’t let average Janes try the ski jump — quel dommage — but we do ascend part-way up the 26-storey tower to stand on the observation deck a
metre or so from where skiers doing about 90 kilometres an hour lift off and soar like kites above the icy drop-off. Casey Colby, the Lake Placid native and
coach who’s giving us a tour of the facility, made his first jump at age six, started competing a year later
and eventually made it to the Nagano Olympics, in 1998. This place is lousy with sports stars.
Mild spring weather and rain prevent us from enjoying the outdoor speed skating oval and the
skating area on dreamy Mirror Lake, so we try our luck at legendary Whiteface, but she too has succumbed
to slush. Instead, I retire to the hotel pool and hot tub at the Crowne Plaza Resort and Golf
Club, perched above the Olympic Center on, you guessed it, Olympic Drive. Even elite athletes need
to rest their muscles once in a while.
Well, they were right about luge. After my triumphant skeleton run, I return to Curve 12 with a
swagger. But this sled is different: two steel runners, or kufens, attached to a frame and overlaid
with a swatch of vinyl to lay back on. Unlike the solid skeleton sled — and the fibreglass-bodied
competition luges — my training sled is flexible and fickle, responding to subtle pressure from your
legs on those kufen crescents at the front. It spans my upper torso from shoulders to thighs, which is
awkward at rest because, again, my head is pinned to the ice by my heavy helmet. Later, it will be pinned to my chest
as I try in vain to peer over an inflated jacket at 78 kilometres an hour to see where I’m going to 81, local code for crash.
I don’t 81. Instead, I DNF. Despite the luge’s title as the “fastest sport on ice,” I get into a nasty wobble near curve 15 and
I’m tossed between the walls like a pinball until, basically, I roll to a stop just shy of the end. Did Not Finish. Gordy Sheer warned
me about the wobble but I was too busy humming “You Can't Touch This” and busting awkward white girl moves before the run.
Me and Leo, we’ll never be Olympians. We lack the iron guts. But for a few days, in downtown Winter Olympia, U.S.A.,
we pushed ourselves into that exquisite intersection of fear and thrill. Now when I hear the Olympic fanfare in February,
I’ll feel a little closer to the podium. In the meantime, I’ll practice haiku:
Luge goes fast on curve
Then bang bang bang bang bang bang
Why not curl instead?
Lisa Gregoire is an Ottawa-based writer and gold medallist in Japanese poetry. Photographer Nancie Battaglia lives in Lake Placid.
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