AILSA CHANG, HOST:
If football is a game of inches, the Olympic sledding sport luge is a game of millimeters. Athletes shoot feet first down an icy track faster than 90 miles per hour. The design of the sled itself can save fractions of a second and help lift athletes to the medal podium or drag them to the middle of the pack. We're going to meet a former USA luger who has been making sleds for almost a dozen countries for this month's Winter Games in Pyeongchang. He does his work from a two-car garage in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state. North Country Public Radio's David Sommerstein brings us the story.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN, BYLINE: The world headquarters of Kennedy Racing Sleds is on a side street in Lake Placid. Tucked behind a couple motorcycles and scooters, Duncan Kennedy stands at a milling machine and drills into steel bars.
DUNCAN KENNEDY: There's usually some hot metal flying around this place at any given time (laughter).
SOMMERSTEIN: No molten metal, but ribbons of metal fly. Kennedy's deadlining to get four sets of steels, the runners on luge sleds, to the Bulgarians for Pyeongchang.
KENNEDY: What runs on the ice a lot of people feel is sort of the holy grail of the sport.
SOMMERSTEIN: Kennedy should know. He's lived World Cup luge for 30 years as a brash Olympian known for a punk haircut and attitude, and then as a USA Luge coach and NBC's luge commentator at the Olympics. He once did a luge run miked for NBC, G forces hammering his voice box at 80 miles an hour.
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KENNEDY: Heading down into six, the first of the big looping corners. Little bit of drive to set up the eleventh - very important to set the eleventh up correctly.
SOMMERSTEIN: Kennedy used to run USA's sled-making program. Erin Hamlin won America's first singles Olympic luge medal in 2014 on a sled Kennedy had a hand in. But the USA Luge Federation fired Kennedy after those games. He says no reason was given. USA Luge says it wanted to go in a different direction. So now Kennedy makes sleds for Sweden, for Romania, for India. Kennedy bends one of the steels into shape in a vice and then measures the bend's radius to hundredths of a millimeter.
Human hair...
KENNEDY: A hair is like a tenth, I think.
SOMMERSTEIN: In luge, you can win or lose by a hundredth of a second, so all the parts of the sled - these steels, the shell an athlete lies on, the candy cane-shaped kuffens used to steer, the metal bridge that holds it together - it all has to be tuned in perfect harmony.
KENNEDY: In other words, you don't want an athlete to all of a sudden start to slide really well, feel the track nicely, great position, and something's just not there with the sled.
SOMMERSTEIN: The giants of luge - the Germans, the Italians - have whole teams of sled designers. And everyone's a spy. Kennedy says he even once hid in a bush and peered through binoculars at a German sled.
KENNEDY: When you go to the track for any given race, any given team is sort of eyeing up or even full-on taking pictures of other people's sleds.
SOMMERSTEIN: Kennedy sands down the steels. He glances around at the clutter of scribbled notes, tools and sled parts, and says he'd never let a competitor in here like this.
KENNEDY: Some of the stuff we're looking at right now actually would never, ever be out in the open.
SOMMERSTEIN: Kennedy's been getting calls from bigger countries like Austria and Canada. After South Korea, he's going to design a new sled for Tucker West, one of USA's most promising sliders. He chuckles.
KENNEDY: I mean, let's face it. We're not talking any big money contracts. You know, this isn't Formula One. It all comes down to basically bragging rights with luge, you know?
SOMMERSTEIN: Kennedy says he'll always root for USA lugers. He was one. But he'd like to brag one of his sleds helped edge an athlete to victory. For NPR °µºÚ±¬ÁÏ, I'm David Sommerstein in Lake Placid, N.Y.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOS CAMPESINOS SONG, "YOU! ME! DANCING!") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
