Engineering in Performance—More Insight into Equipment
The USA Luge Team had a fantastic January. The sliders at the Youth Olympic Games in Igls, Austria, took a Gold Medal in the team relay event on January 17—the USA Luge Team’s first Gold Medal in an Olympic-type event—and only a few days later, on January 22, the team of Erin Hamlin in women’s singles and Chris Mazdzer in men’s singles, joined by the doubles sled of Christian Niccum and Jayson Terdiman, captured a Silver Medal at the World Cup competition in Winterberg, Germany.
Way to go, Team!
Excitement is high among long-term fans and the sport is gaining more attention among Americans because of the outstanding performance of our young athletes. As readers of my blog series know, the equipment the sliders use to compete needs to be the best we can make it, so the natural athletic talent of our sliders is aided to the maximum extent possible by the gear they use to compete.
We have spoken about the need to make a luge run at the ideal weight, and how Vulcan supplies the team lead weights for use in sleds and body suits. Yet not everything the sliders use aims in the direction of heaviness. For example, helmets, which are the only piece of safety equipment the sliders use. The helmet is as light as we can make it and for good reason.
When a slider shoots into a turn, he or she can be pulling 3 G’s of force. Since the sliders must hold their heads up the entire time during the run to see where they are going, you can image how much pressure is exerted on their head and neck. Every extra ounce of helmet weight in these circumstances is an unwelcome negative factor, so designers have created helmets that feel like they have no weight at all.
The sliders’ helmets are made by a company named UVEX. The helmets that company supplies have a clear face shield and are made of Kevlar, so they are both strong and extremely light in weight. Keeping the helmet as light as possible is another way the USA Luge Team makes sure it is “engineering in performance” for every piece of equipment it uses.
The sliders also wear special shoes, sometimes called “booties,” and they keep their feet pointed forward during a run. That’s because the toe of each bootie is designed to be highly aerodynamic. Result: the design helps slice through air resistance for maximum speed.
The last piece of equipment I’ll talk about in this blog are the gloves. Typically, gloves are made of leather and have small spikes sticking out at the fingertips. At the beginning of a run, sliders use these spikes to claw their way to the fastest possible speed right out of the starting gate.
These spikes are about .200 inches long—close to a quarter- inch. They are very sharp and so designed to enable the athlete to really dig into the ice at the start of the run. This piece of equipment gives sliders another way to impact the speed of their overall run.
What I find most interesting is how all these pieces come together to facilitate a fast, precise run. As I have said before, a slider can win or lose a race by one thousandths of a second.
Fortunately, in the business world our competitive timing isn’t quite that demanding. Nonetheless, we have to run fast and run flawlessly to satisfy customers. That’s why our entire company finds such inspiration in watching the USA Luge Team compete, studying their attention to detail, and learning from their relentless dedication to excellence.
Read more about this at www.usaluge.org. Sign up to receive news and follow the team.
Luge is one of the Winter Olympics’ most exciting sports. It is certainly one of the most competitive and thrilling to watch. Keep up with your team.
Also, find out more about the Vulcan engineering capabilities we draw on to help our team at www.vulcangms.com