19 Years of Heavy Support for the USA Luge Team
One afternoon in 1992, my wife Sandy and I had the TV tuned to the Winter Olympics being held in Albertville, France. We found it riveting to watch young athletes sliding down an icy track, feet first, at speeds exceeding 90 miles per hour. This was our introduction to luging and we felt the excitement. We later discovered it is the fastest winter sport—the only one timed in thousandths-of-a-second increments.
We followed the USA Luge Team closely. Back then, we were not a strong competitor and there was little awareness of the sport in the States. Between competitions, as the athletes talked about their equipment, one item that caught my attention was lead weights. Luging is all about sliding downhill. Gravity is your friend. The heavier you are, the faster you go. All “sliders” [as luge athletes call themselves] want to weigh in at the legal limit to take full advantage of gravity.
Luge has a lot of rules about wearing lead. The rules help to level the playing field between a 125-pound slider versus a 250-pound slider. As I was running a very small company back in 1992, I identified with the underdog position of the USA Luge Team: I know how you have to move faster and try harder when competing.
Vulcan was so small back then we did not have a marketing budget. But we had lead. We had the means to provide the team with some heavyweight support. It occurred to me that a great way to let the world know we existed was to give lead weights to sliders. When the team got back from France I called and spoke to Dymtre Feld. I explained who I was and offered to donate balance weights to the entire team. The US luge team was thrilled with my offer. What slider wouldn’t want free lead!
That was the start of the 19-year relationship between the USA Luge Team and Vulcan. Today, we have the distinction of being the oldest supplier and supporter of the team.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about luge weights themselves and how “engineering in performance” guided our efforts to help the team compete more effectively.
Meanwhile, learn more about the inspirational USA Luge Team at: http://usaluge.org/, and see a video of me speaking about our support of the USA Luge Team (see video).