Gavin and Allison Fall Down: Bobsled Edition

Gavin and Allison Fall Down is a recurring series where we try Norwegian winter sports and recount our shortcomings for your amusement. This edition: Bobsled

Previous editions: curling, ski jumping

Among the most simplistic of the world’s sports are the sliding sports.  We’re up here, the finish line is down there, and we each have a sled.  The sliding sports (including luge, which takes place on your back on a sled; skeleton, on your stomach on a sled; and bobsled, on your butt, in a sled, with some friends) are that, plus engineering, money, and a disregard for personal safety.

Let us now get the Cool Runnings reference out of the way.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWBcaQxmPlY&w=560&h=315]

Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to try these sports unless you live near a former Winter Olympics venue.  What this meant is that if we were going to meet our goal of becoming acquainted with as many Winter Olympics sports as possible, we were going to have to go to Lillehammer, the home of the 1994 Winter Olympics (Harding-Kerrigan, Dan Jansen, etc.).

Lillehammer is conveniently placed on the Trondheim-Oslo train line, which winds through national parks and mountains, giving us a gorgeous view of country where it has been winter for some time.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dNJXR7l0wc?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

The bobsled track is one train stop away from Lillehammer proper, servicing not only an Olympic venue, but also many of Norway’s most popular ski slopes and one of Norway’s largest tourist attractions, Hunderfossen Familiepark.  So, of course we get off the train in middle to late afternoon to see this:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A–mfvNIieQ?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

It was 4pm, totally dark, and there were no street lights anywhere. We made our way by the light of our cell phone screens. Google Maps assured us that the bobsled track was within a 30 minute walk, but with no people around, and without the benefit of plowed streets, it felt like a giant ruse. But then again, this was a pretty representative Norwegian experience. There aren’t that many people here, and you have to trudge through some snow, but then you come upon something world class.

We made it to the venue, which had about three cars in the parking lot. Luckily one of them belonged to our driver, who bussed us up to the top of the run.

The top of the run isn’t really the top, they have a second entrance for non-competitors like us onto the track three turns down.  This is simply because the G forces aren’t safe for untrained people if you let the sled get a full track’s worth of speed.  As it was, we had helmets, kidney belts, and most portentiously, we had signed our first waiver of all our adventures in Norway attesting to our lack of spine or neck problems.

The driver didn’t really make a show about the bobsled, or try to sell us on its coolness. The instructions were, keep your back straight, breathe in and hold before each turn, and anticipate the turns by leaning your head.  This was all made more difficult by the fact that as the person in the back, I couldn’t actually see around Allison’s helmeted head to know what was coming, so it would be a ride of surprises.  We did no pushing; our driver got us started by pulling on a rope, and we simply sat in the back.

The track tells us we go about 75 mi/hr, and encounter 5 Gs of force around the corner.  I have no way of knowing if that’s accurate, but I do know that the ride was legitimately pretty intense, and that another three turns would have been too much to comfortably handle without training.  All in all, the ride was 56 seconds long, and we were congratulated with a certificate and a pin.

We asked how often they have competitions there, and the driver told us that they host a couple of events a year, mostly for the luge. As best we can tell, the rest of the time it’s just available for anyone like us or the other 10,139 people (judging by the numbers on our certificates) in the past 23 years (440 annually) who pay for the opportunity to try it. By my rough estimate, we tourists have brought in $1.2 million in revenue over this time period. It seems like a very expensive facility to maintain for these purposes.

I don’t think we discovered a hidden passion for the sport of bobsledding, but it was a lot of fun, and a great thing to check off a lifetime experiences list.