All downhill from here

One Winter Game Leaves Him Cold

By Rick Horowitz

We will discuss now the glories of the luge.

You've been watching the Olympics, haven't you? At least the little bit of Olympics they manage to squeeze in between all the commercials and the chitchat? That's okay -- I've been watching, too: speedskating and figure skating, some downhill, a dash of hockey. And luge. Hours and hours of luge.

I don't get luge.

I mean, I get the concept -- it's your childhood sled on amphetamines, sanded and polished to an aerodynamic fare-thee-well, and then you lie on your back at enormous speeds and dream about endorsements.

I get all that. I just don't get why anyone should watch it.

That's not totally fair. Luge has its good points, even from the spectator's point of view:

* Great spandex.

* "Sliders" -- people who luge for a living are called "sliders." This is lots better than calling them "lugers," which depending on how badly you mispronounce it, makes them sound either like a German pistol or an Indiana senator, and even if you pronounce it right (to rhyme with Hoosiers, apparently), makes you sound like you've had one too many back at the ski lodge -- "What a bunch of lugers!"

* Great spandex.

Those are the good points. And the bad points? Only one, really: You haven't the slightest idea of what's going on. The first luger -- slider -- breaks from the gate, darts through the curves, flashes down the straightaways, flies past the finish line. Then the next one does it. Then the next. When everyone's finished, they tell you who won.

And they all look exactly the same.

Admit it: If they made all those folks wear the same color tights and stuck them on the same color sled, would you have a prayer of telling them apart? Better yet: If they had only one slider and one sled, and simply ran the tape of that one over and over again, would you notice? No way.

Sure, there's the occasional slider who loses control and goes rump over Rototiller, but by and large, every run is a carbon copy of every other run. And then the timer figures out that this one was seven hundredths of a second faster than this one, which was 12 hundredths of a second faster than that one.

Not to these untrained eyes, thanks. Fast is fast, and it's not even like a horse race, say, where they're sprinting to the wire and you think you can see the nose of one just barely ahead of the nose of the other as they cross the line. In luge it's "Beat the Clock," plain and simple, and there's absolutely no way to tell the beater from the beatee.

But why pick on luge?, you wonder -- it's the same thing in skiing. True enough, although at least in skiing you can see them doing things all the way down the mountain, and this guy's moves don't always look like that guy's moves.

In luge, though, after the first couple of hand-paddles to get them started ("Plenty of broken fingernails out there today, Paula." "You bet, Tim.") they lie down, they look up, and as far as the rest of the world can tell, they're along for the ride.

Ah, but look, the announcers scream -- he's increasing the pressure of his right shoulder on the sled! Look now, they cry -- her left ankle is turning in!

They're whipping past the cameras at seventy -- eighty! -- miles an hour, and we're supposed to notice that her left ankle is turning in? Get real!

Great spandex, though.

Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist, TV commentator and public speaker.