Skeleton Set to Take World Stage in Salt Lake City

One might call it the grandfather of extreme sports. Skeleton, the sport in which competitors hurtle headfirst down an ice track on a flat metal sled at speeds exceeding 80 miles per hour, was contested at the 1928 and 1948 Winter Games. It will be on the program once again in Salt Lake City after 54 years. Former World Champion Steffi Hanzlik and Diana Sartor make up Germany's women's team. Eight-time German champion and 1998 World Champion Willi Schneider and Frank Kleber represent the men.

Hanzlik hopes to be in position to win in Salt Lake City.

Skeleton was invented as a pastime in the 1880s in Switzerland's St. Moritz, where the first racers would slide seated or laying on their backs on sleds down streets to the town of Celerina, where winners were rewarded with a bottle of champagne. It didn't take long for racers to figure out they could go much faster if they went down headfirst. Soon these icy road races developed into a competitive sport, but not an Olympics mainstay. After decades off the world stage, a skeleton World Cup series was launched in 1985.

The technical advances of the last century seem to have eluded skeleton sledmakers - the three-foot by 16-inch boards with two fixed runners have no brakes or steering mechanisms. The sport is named for the sleds, which were thought to resemble skeletons and are today made of steel or fiberglass. The combined weight of the sled and driver cannot exceed 115 kilograms for men and 92 kilograms for women. Riders wear helmets and chin guards, which might seem like meager protection when only two inches separate a rider's face from the ice track. Steering is accomplished by shifts in weight and position and, sometimes, by dragging a toe.

The town of Altenberg in Saxony is home to one of Germany's main ice tracks, a 1413-meter run with a 122-meter overall change in altitude. Altenberg was home to the 2002 national skeleton championships, as well as the European Championship in luge. It is one of only four bobsport tracks in Germany; the most famous is the Königsee track in Berchtesgaden.

Steffi Hanzlik won the overall World Cup title in 1999 and the World Championships in 2000. She managed to finish 2nd overall in the 2000/2001 World Cup, and this year is ranked sixth in the world. Hanzlik, a former luger, took up skeleton in 1995 after watching a race. "It took me about one and a half years to get the driving technique, but then it was extremely fun," Hanzlik said last year in an interview with www.sport.de. "The appeal of a skeleton sled is that one's head is only a few centimeters over the ice and one constantly sees the upcoming curves. Although, if you're positioning your head optimally, you can only see two and a half meters ahead." Hanzlik, 26, is in the army, which supports her and allows her to train. Olympic teammate Sartor is ranked seventh.

On the men's team, Willi Schneider, 38, is Germany's senior slider, having taken up the sport in 1989. Schneider, an engineering draftsman who lives in Waldkraiburg, is currently ranked ninth in the world. Teammate Frank Kleber, 20, of Munich is ranked fourteenth.

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