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The earliest bobsleds were little more than outsize wooden toboggans. Teams of five or six (reduced to two and four in the 1930s) would pile on and hang tight as they skidded around an iced-down chute carved out of one of St. Moritz's finest snowbanks by resort owner Caspar Badrutt for his patrons' amusement in the 1870s. Today's bobsleds, though, are like bladed fiberglass rockets powered by the explosive starts of the pushers. Turn pressures on the most winding courses range between 3G and 5G, and the sleds reach speeds of up to 95 miles per hour. The new track at Whistler, just outside of Vancouver, is the world's steepest, with a vertical drop of about 500 feet.
Bobsledding has been contested at every Olympic Winter Games since 1924, with the exception of the 1960 Squaw Valley Games, when the track was ditched due to expense. Today bobsled runs are made of concrete and covered in artificially made ice and by regulation have at least one straightaway and one labyrinth.
The sled's solid steel runners are the most crucial component and, as each team may utilize only three pairs of runners per season, are subject to extreme scrutiny and care (pilots have been known to keep them locked in gun boxes in their rooms). Runners must be cooled to air temperature for one hour before a race and are disqualified if they are too warm. The only substance that may be applied is acetone from a common source to remove impurities that may slow the sled, because a loss in speed near the top of the course is difficult to recover before the finish line.
Since the first Olympic Winter Games in 1924, the advent of television has allowed the event to grow from a small happening witnessed by a few thousand to a worldwide spectacle that connects billions around the globe, but today's viewers still must inevitably pick and choose which of the vast and various events to watch. The Opening Ceremony, however, is a rare, unifying moment that captures the attention of the world and represents the spirit of the Olympic Games, a celebration of passion, sportsmanship, and peace.
The Olympic Games have certainly come a long way since 1924, when the first winter version was held at Chamonix, France, with only about 10,000 viewers over the course of the events' eleven days. While the same basic format for the Ceremony still stands, with the presentation of the athletes, the raising of the Olympic and host nation's flags, and finally, the lighting of the Olympic cauldron with the torch's flame, the ceremony has become increasingly elaborate over the years.
In 1960, Walt Disney himself hosted the ceremony for the Olympic Winter Games in Squaw Valley, California, and imbued the celebrations with his eponymous magic and whimsy, organizing thousands of performers and even the release of 2000 doves.
Most recently, the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino, Italy, marked a new (literal) peak in the festivities, with the tallest Olympic flame cauldron to date. The Opening Ceremony itself drew an audience of 35,000 on the ground, not to mention the estimated 2 billion television viewers watching at home.
Curling was contested at the 1924 Winter Olympic Games in Chamonix and not again until 1998, when both men's and women's events were added to the Nagano roster. But because the 1924 games were only later legitimized, the winners of that first curling tournament weren't officially recognized as Olympic Games Champions until 2006.
In the sport, which is believed to have its origins in late-medieval Scotland, a rounded granite stone weighing between 38 and 44 pounds is launched by a thrower, called a skip, across the ice toward a target. The teammates' aggressive sweeping—formerly with straw brooms, now with high-tech carbon fibers—temporarily melts the ice in the stone's path, allowing it to travel farther and straighter. The smoothness of the ice is a major factor in the stone's trajectory, and top-level clubs employ their own ice makers, who are known by name, the rock stars of the sport. The medal leaders are Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland, although the U. S. men's team scored its first medal, a bronze, at Torino in 2006.
Leave it to the French to cause a sensation. At the 1960 Squaw Valley Games, Jean Vuarnet became the first athlete to medal on metal—skis, that is, rather than the traditional wood runners. Today's top alpinists ride skis made from pressed layers of aluminum and fiberglass or Kevlar, titanium, carbon, or boron fibers that dampen vibrations and increase response.
The Olympic Games have long been a showcase and a driver of technological innovation in sports. Performance-focused sportswear reflects advancements in fabrics for insulation, wicking, and waterproofing. And unlike the early games, in most sports pads and helmets are now de rigeur—as is the liberal application of Lycra for aerodynamics. Building and testing Olympic venues has also provided valuable data on grades and turn degrees, slope grooming, and snow-making systems for resort areas (although the hosts held out until 1980 to introduce artificial snow to the Lake Placid Games).
The relative advantage of certain advancements is hotly disputed and carefully regulated by each discipline to ensure fairness. But at least one piece of equipment has remained largely the same since the inaugural games at Chamonix: the ice skate. Since the 1914 invention of a closed-toe boot with a blade constructed from a single piece of steel, nearly all competitors have met on equal footing—making the dramatic development in the ambition and scope of skaters' routines all the more impressive.
At the 1924 Chamonix Games, the Canadian hockey team shut out its competitors, setting the course for 40 years of dominance. In the first three matches alone, they scored 85 times, and had only three goals scored against them by the end of the tournament. But perhaps the most memorable upset was the Cold War-era "Miracle on Ice," at Lake Placid 1980, in which a green U.S. team of amateur and collegiate players (none older than 22) defeated the Soviet powerhouse, which had won every gold but one since 1956, in a medal round and went on to beat Finland in the final.
Hockey, as one of the few Olympic Winter Game sports to draw from the ranks of national-team leagues, has long been subject to dispute over the admittance of professional athletes, but the International Olympic Committee has allowed NHL-contracted players to compete since 1998—the same year the women's event was added to the Nagano roster. The Vancouver games will be the first to be played on an NHL-sized rink, which is slightly narrower (85 feet) than the standard international rink (98 feet).
Figure skating was the most-watched Olympic Games event in 2006 and has produced a reliable crop of crowd favorites. And while ice skating has been practiced for centuries, what is recognized today as a sport and an art was pioneered by the American skater Jackson Haines, who introduced an expressionistic, free-flowing style in the 1860s and the toe pick in the 1870s, making possible a new class of jumps. Men's and women's singles and pairs were part of the original program in Chamonix in 1924, while ice dancing was inaugurated in 1976. Today's figure skaters are required to demonstrate salchows, axels, and lutzes and incorporate highly acrobatic lifts, throws, and spins.
The darling of the early Games was Sonja Henie, a young Norwegian skater who ignited a stateside craze for white boots and short skirts. The postwar years brought Dick Button, who won his second gold medal while he was a full-time senior at Harvard. A slew of sophisticated and technically adept Soviet and Russian teams have dominated the top slot in pairs since 1964.
The former standard of the 6.0 scale (memorably captured in dancing by Great Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean at Sarajevo in 1984) was abandoned in favor of a cumulative score in 2004.
Skeleton is a sliding sport practiced on the same ice tracks as bobsled and luge. Riders plunge headfirst down the track on a stripped-down steel-frame sled, reaching speeds of 80 miles per hour and forces of up to 5G—all without brakes or steering mechanisms. The sport, like bobsled, evolved from the popular nineteenth-century St. Moritz amusement of Cresta sledding, racing an iced, three-quarter-mile track with ten turns down the Alps—not for the faint of heart. Skeleton was part of the Winter Olympic Games when they were held in St. Moritz in 1928 and again in 1948, but was then removed from the program. The sport made a triumphant comeback at the Salt Lake City 2002 Games and featured a women's competition for the first time.
Aside from the death-tempting speeds, how did skeleton get its name? Opinions differ. Some believe the old name "skele" derives from a misapprehension of the Norwegian word kjaelke, or "ice sled." Others point to the 1892 reworking of the standard sled by an Englishman named L. P. Child, who stripped the apparatus down to its "skeleton." The United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Switzerland tend to dominate international competition.
Even diehard powder hounds share a collective, envious sigh when watching the incomparable speed and agility of today's ski racers and jumpers. Since the 1924 Chamonix trailblazers, skiing has evolved into he most varied and dynamic part of the winter program. Olympic skiing was originally split between Alpine events—downhill, slalom, giant slalom, and super giant slalom—and the Nordic disciplines, which include ski jump, cross-country skiing, and its cousin, biathlon, which adds the challenge of target shooting to the mix. Versatility is rewarded with medals for combined scores in Alpine and Nordic. A freestyle category was added in 1992 at Albertville and currently features aerial, moguls, and skicross. Freestyle skiing emerged in the 1960s in Sun Valley, Idaho, and was popularly known as "hot-dogging" on account of its impressive jumps and tricks.
Aerial freestyle is the more acrobatic form of ski jumping, which is classified as Nordic thanks to Olaf Rye, a Norwegian officer in Morgedal, who made the first leap in front of an audience of his soldiers in 1809. Today, ski jump is the only winter Olympic sport from which women are barred, a fact that was challenegd by 15 female ski jumpers who filed a discrimination suit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC). A judge ruled in June, however, that the matter fell under the purview of the International Olympic Committee. The IOC's position is that the relatively small field of competitors and countries would "dilute" the significance of a women's medal. Who holds the current record for distance on the Vancouver hill where the games will be contested? An American woman named Lindsey Van.
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