Königssee ICC - Summary & Pictures Part 2

EDIT: To clarify, I'm not back in Europe, I'm just posting updates on the part of the trip that didn't get blogged about while I was there (too sick). I know, these random out-of-time posts can be confusing!

The track is old, and it looks old! It's so old that it's grandfathered into the FIBT - its design doesn't meet the requirements for new tracks.

We did a trackwalk on day 2 since there was no paid training. I could hardly make the hike up the track, which didn't bode well for the race. Oh well! Here I am looking at the kreisel:


A couple luge sleds going through Old Ziel, the "finish" corner. They've now added some additional corners after Ziel, so it's called Old Ziel instead of Ziel. It's the highest G-load corner of any track in the world, around 7 Gs, or so I'm told. All I know is that I couldn't keep my face off the ice in there! Notice no shortwall....(shortwall means the wall on the opposite side of the turn...here it is just turn) see where Brad and I are standing, normally there's a wall there!




A track walk.


The transitions between some of the turns (in this case, the S-turns) are so narrow! I was scared I'd plow into the wall headfirst, but it's actually super smooth and a lot of fun.


The S-turns are my favorite track feature anywhere now. Even being sick, they were a blast! You go from big swooping right hand turn immediately to big swooping left hand turn, four of them in a row! Super fun, like being on a roller coaster.


The old wood look.


Bendaway. This is the craziest thing I've seen on any track. It's a long "straight" that has several bends, but no curves and thus no G-load. Skeleton sleds really can't steer without a G-load, so in straights we have a hard time. The way to drive this is the deliberately hit the wall partway down, to get just enough bounce to thread the needle of the last two bends. It's crazy! All along we're taught not to hit walls, then this one track we are supposed to do it on purpose - it was difficult. This is where I lost my speed in the race - I hit the wall a hair too hard, and that meant I bounced twice more before entering the next curve. Oops!


Looking at Bendaway from the middle of Kreisel. As you can see I'm higher up than Bendaway...the first part of Kreisel is uphill to this point, so if you skid or bounce through Bendaway, you're scrubbing a TON of speed.


So, race day. I managed not to cough on my sled, but it was my slowest race push to date (if compared to training) and I was dizzy. Overall I still had a decent run, managing not to cough on my sled, but the dizziness, multiple hits in Bendaway, and an uphill skid out of Old Ziel, sealed my fate and I finished in 21st place. Considering how sick I was, I'm happy. Plus, it's literally one of the most fun tracks, falling (barely) into second place behind Altenberg as my favorite tracks thus far.

OH!!! How did I almost forget! Königssee is supposedly one of the hardest tracks for foreigners to get on, so we knew going in that Brad was VERY VERY unlikely to be allowed to slide. When we got there, I recognized one of the Jury members as one I'd met in Altenberg, who is super nice and helpful and friendly regardless of what nation you are from. It turned out he was the Jury president, and when I asked him "I know the answer is probably no, but I thought I'd ask anyway...could Brad forerun?" He paused for a second, turned to the local track manager, fired off some rapid German, turned back, and said "Ok."

We were stunned, and so excited! We rushed back to the hotel to grab his sled since he could slide starting day 1, and off he went!

Brad got to forerun for all three days of practice, getting as many runs as he could. He couldn't forerun the race since they had enough local sliders, but even getting to slide at all is a miracle in Königssee! So that's two of the most representative tracks in Europe, under his belt.