The Best American Sports Writing 2011 Read Online Free Page B

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FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE
    R UBEN "SPEEDY" GONZALEZ was always the last kid picked in physical education class, but he wanted to be in the Olympics. So he settled on luge by default.
    "I needed a sport with lots of broken bones because I knew there would be quitters—and I never quit," he told Reuters last week. "I'll be the last man standing."
    Or at least sitting. Gonzalez, who lives in Texas and competes for Argentina, is 47 now and yesterday he was bidding to become the first man to compete in four Winter Games across four decades. The secret to his survival is that he doesn't mind busting up a hand, a foot, an elbow, a rib when he slams into iced concrete and that he's invariably the slowest man on the track.
    After the first two of four runs, Gonzalez is sitting a distant last among 38 competitors, more than eight seconds behind German leader Felix Koch and more than two seconds out of 37th place in a sport that is measured to the thousandth.
    Until Friday, Gonzalez, a former photocopier salesman, was one of those charming quadrennial oddities, like Eddie The Eagle and Eric The Eel, who capture the public's imagination because they're Everyman, our Plimptonian ambassador to Olympus. But once Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili died after a terrifying crash during a practice run on the Whistler speedway, watching Gonzalez slip-slide his way down the world's fastest run lost its amusing allure.
    Luge always has attracted more Olympic "tourists" than the rest of the winter sports because anyone can do it. Just lie on your back and let gravity handle the rest. But once the amateur's amateur finds himself hurtling along at 90 miles an hour and ping-ponging from wall to wall before flipping over and ending up in a plaster cast, he learns a painful lesson. These Games can kill you.
    There are 15 sports on the winter program and half of them can be fatal if you don't know what you're doing or simply have bad luck. All of the sliding sports—bobsled, luge, skeleton—are an orthopedic surgeon's dream. Ski jumping is flying without wings. Freestyle aerials are an upside-down lottery. The downhill is heart-stopping, even for gold medalists. And the snowboard halfpipe is the plaything of the devil as Kevin Pearce, who suffered a severe head injury in the Olympic trials, can testify.
    Even short-track speed skating can put you in the hospital for weeks. Allison Baver, who'll be competing here, shattered her right tibia last season after colliding with teammate Katherine Reutter in a World Cup race. At the trials, J. R. Celski ripped open his left thigh with his right skate blade after hitting the wall, nearly severing his femoral artery.
    The Winter Games are dangerous enough for elite athletes who have been competing for years. They're no place for adventure seekers like the Latin American skier who'd never even been on a bunny slope but wanted to compete in the 1992 Games in Albertville. To prepare himself, he promised, he'd take a week of lessons in Val d'Isère.
    By establishing qualifying standards before the 1994 Games, the International Olympic Committee tried to put a stop to absolute amateurs who'd convinced their countries to give them a parade uniform and a starting number. Even so, a sobering number of qualifiers probably have no business in the Games.
    Kumaritashvili was no neophyte. He'd spent two years on the World Cup circuit, competed in five races this season, four of them on Olympic tracks, and ranked 44th in the overall standings. But he clearly was in over his head here.
    The Whistler track is known as the "Elevator Shaft" because it plunges downward like the express elevator in a Manhattan skyscraper. It's fast and technical and even the best sliders in the world, like two-time champion Armin Zoeggeler of Italy, flipped during training runs last week. At high speed, even modest crashes are scary.
    "When you hit that ice, it turns into fire," testified U.S. doubles slider Christian Niccum, a