WINTER OLYMPICS: The Irish skeleton racer Clifton Wrottesley made an impressive start to his campaign for glory here in Salt Lake City, when he finished fourth and seventh in the training heats at Utah Olympic Park on Monday.
Wrottesley, a fund manager based in London, caused something of a stir on the run. Having failed to qualify for the finals of the World Championships in Calgary last year and after finishing 36th in the World Cup, he was considered a rank outsider.
But his time of 49.12 seconds in the morning (achieving a top speed of 82.4 miles an hour) left him highly ranked going into the second round of training heats, where his seventh-place finish kept eyebrows firmly raised.
Skeleton is best described as a head-first version of the luge. The birthplace of the sport is the Cresta Run at St Moritz, where the track is built from scratch for enthusiasts every winter, providing them with a U-shaped tunnel of blue ice four feet wide.
Riders turn by shifting their bodyweight and brake by grating the tops of spikes attached to the tips of special boots - or trying to, at any rate. The total drop is 514 feet, or about 50 stories. Heating or waxing the blades of the sled is forbidden.
The idea is to navigate your sled over the run without breaking your neck. That's harder than it sounds. The Cresta run at St Moritz has claimed four lives and every winter is responsible for a casualty department of broken bones and severe abrasions. There is a fee of $265 for the privilege of five rides.
Skeleton is on the Olympic programme this year for the first time since 1948. Prior to that it was part of the 1928 games. The sport has a reputation for attracting eccentrics and Wrottesley, a British lord with a passion for vineyards, is no exception.
"It's a strange sort of mistress, the Cresta," he said recently. "You can be so close to success and lose it completely and literally in a fraction of a second with a slight lapse of judgment, because at that speed you can't account for it.
"Imagine going down a highway at about 90 mph. Open the car door. Stick your face about an inch or two from the tarmac. Then try to imagine you're on an ice track with little else around you other than your skin suit, as it were, between you and the ice wall.
"The Cresta is designed to scare you witless," said Wrottesley. "Skeleton is more about refining technique to the nth degree, finding precisely the right line through the ice."
The finals of the competition will be held today.
CROSS COUNTRY
Men: 1.5km sprint qualifying round: 70 Paul O'Connor (Irl) 4:33.82. First semi-final 1. P Schlickenrieder (Ger) 3min 09.9sec, 2. B Lind (Swe) at .5sec, 3. T Iversen (Nor) .6, 4. H Manninen (Fin) 4.2. Second semi-final 1. C Zorzi (Ita) 2min 59.9sec, 2. T Arne Hetland (Nor) at .0sec, 3. F Schwienbacher (Ita) .3, 4. T Angerer (Ger) .5, 5. J Krezelok (Pol). Final: 1 T Arne Hetland (Nor) 2:56.9, 2 P Schlickenrieder (Ger) 2:57.0, 3 C Zorzi (Ita) 2:57.2, 4 B Lind (Swe) 2:58.1.
Women: 1.5km sprint final: 1. Y Chepalova (Rus) 3 minutes 10.6 seconds 2. E Sachenbacher (Ger) 3:12.2 3. A Moen (Norway) 3:12.7 4. C Kuenzel (Ger) 3:13.3.
