By TIM REYNOLDS, AP Sports activities Author
Former U.S. skeleton athlete John Daly was as soon as requested why anybody would resolve to hurl themselves, head first, down an ice-coated mountainside chute on a skinny sled with no security gear aside from a helmet.
Daly laughed. “If I knew that, I most likely wouldn’t be out right here,” he stated.
Skeleton would be the sport for thrill-seekers to look at in the course of the Milan Cortina Olympics. Not everybody can skate, not everybody has been on skis, only a few would dare to strive ski leaping, however anybody who has ever performed within the snow most likely is aware of the sensation of what skeleton athletes get on race day. It’s the joys of being on a sled, choosing up velocity, making an attempt to determine the way to steer with out having something to steer with, then getting up and doing it once more.
It’s been within the Olympics since 1928, however took two lengthy hiatuses and returned to this system in 2002.
The way it works
Skeleton is the head-first sliding sport. Races start with the sled on the ice, and the slider grabbing certainly one of its handles, often with one hand. The slider runs about 30 meters or so to construct up velocity, then leaps onto the sled and settles in for a trip that may exceed 80 mph (129 kph) down the observe. Athletes steer with refined shifts of their physique and legs, all whereas their chins are sometimes no quite a lot of inches from the floor of the ice.
Who to look at
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FILE – Matt Weston of Nice Britain celebrates after successful the boys’s skeleton on the Skeleton World Cup race in Igls, close to Innsbruck, Austria, Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. (AP Photograph/Petr David Josek, File)
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FILE – Matt Weston of Nice Britain celebrates after successful the boys’s skeleton on the Skeleton World Cup race in Igls, close to Innsbruck, Austria, Friday, Dec. 15, 2023. (AP Photograph/Petr David Josek, File)
There won’t be a much bigger gold-medal favourite on the Milan Cortina Video games than British males’s skeleton athlete Matt Weston, the world champion who has merely dominated most World Cup and worldwide fields. He was solely fifteenth on the Beijing Video games, then has gone gold-silver-gold within the final three world championships. Within the ladies’s race, there are a slew of medal favorites and the sentimental selection is perhaps Austrian nice Janine Flock, perhaps the highest feminine skeleton racer ever, however she has but to win an Olympic medal or a world championships gold. And within the debut of the combined workforce skeleton occasion on the Olympics, watch People Mystique Ro and Austin Florian, the reigning world champions in that race.
Venues and dates
Competitors will happen from Feb. 12-15 on the Cortina Sliding Heart.
Memorable moments
Jimmy Shea and Tristan Gale received gold for the U.S. when the game returned to the Olympic program at Salt Lake Metropolis in 2002. Shea was racing shortly after the demise of his grandfather, Olympic speedskater Jack Shea, who received two gold medals at Lake Placid in 1932, and Jimmy Shea’s father Jim was an Olympic skier for the U.S. in 1964. Canada’s Jon Montgomery went from nationwide right here to nationwide legend on the 2010 Vancouver Video games when he received gold within the males’s skeleton race. On his solution to an interview afterwards, an onlooker handed him a pitcher of beer and he promptly chugged about half of it.
Enjoyable info
The game dates to the late nineteenth century, and its relatively uncommon identify is believed to return from how the primary metallic sleds constructed for the game had a bony, skeletal look. Skeleton was within the 1928 and 1948 Olympic packages, then fell into obscurity earlier than it was revived as a World Cup sport and returned to the Olympics in 2002.
AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
