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January/February 2010: Fast Times at Whitehall High |
Fast Times at Whitehall High
On the track with the country's only public school bobsled team
by Luke Cyphers
photographs by Aaron Hobson
It’s a bright winter’s day at the Lake Placid Olympic bobsled and luge run. To fend off the attack of solar radiation, a white curtain is pulled over the serpentine length of the track to shade the icy racing surface. It’s quiet, almost tranquil. And then you hear a train-track rumble emanating from beneath the curtain, the sound of teenagers keeping alive an Adirondack tradition: they’re flying down a frozen hill in a sled.
During the week, Emily and Olivia Sweeney are polite, down-to-earth students at Whitehall High School, in the historic town on the park’s southeastern border. Emily is a varsity cheerleader, and both sisters run track every spring. But right now, and every Sunday during the winter, they’re extreme athletes, competing for the only scholastic bobsled team in the country. They’ve made a two-hour drive to the track, like they do every week from January through March, then spent an hour in the sled shed—think a NASCAR garage, only smaller, with no engine noise—carefully sanding the metal runners on the well-worn junior sled. Now comes the reward, a thrill that only a high-speed, open-air ride five inches off the ground provides. Emily, a ninth-grader, is the driver, while Olivia, two years younger, hunkers down behind her sibling as the brakeman for their team, the Sister Act. As they swoosh through the track’s Curve 17, Whitehall’s coach and the program’s founder, Alan Bascue, takes in the sight of kids in a heightened state of awareness. “You watch them come down,” Bascue says, “and all you can see is a helmet full of eyes.” Saucer-size eyes.
It’s unforgettable. “The first time Emily came through and took the turn, my heart just about stopped,” says Andrea Sweeney, mother of the Sister Act. “It was an adrenaline rush just for me to watch it.”
It’s certainly an adrenaline rush for the Whitehall sliders. When sophomore Patricia Snow first tried it two years ago, she says, “I thought my stomach fell out of my butt. I was like, I don’t know what I got myself into.”
Not everyone seems so excited. Codie Bascue, a ninth-grader, makes the Sunday drive sound like, well, a Sunday drive. “You’re going 50 miles an hour down the ice every week,” he says, matter-of-factly. “It’s pretty fun.”
That’s the point, says Codie’s coach and grandpa, Alan Bascue. That, and the chance to do something unique. Says the elder Bascue: “How many 12- or 14-year-olds can say, ‘I’m a bobsledder’?”
Those words mean something special to Bascue, who grew up in Whitehall racing cars, motorcycles and anything else that moved, before he discovered bobsleds back in the late ’80s. He fell in with a group of men who sometimes raised hell after racing like hell down the old Lake Placid track, and he got good enough to make the U.S. domestic team, competing against teams from all over the country. Bascue’s generation never won gold in the Olympics, but that wasn’t really the goal. They were underfunded and often ignored by the American sports establishment, scrounging castoff sleds from the powerful German teams. But they were part of something simultaneously local and global, and they took pride in it. For the sport’s first half-century the Lake Placid area was a hotbed of cool runnings, producing whole families of top-flight sliders: the Stevenses, the Benhams, the Sheas and the Morgans. “The sport belonged to the North Country,” Bascue says.
In the early 1990s that started to change. Big business and high tech moved into bobsledding and started to push the locals out. While the national teams developed faster sleds with the help of national automakers, the sport’s governing body filled them with out-of-towners—track athletes from the South like Brian Shimer, even moonlighting professional football players like Herschel Walker and Willie Gault.
Eventually, the U.S. once again began winning Olympic medals and World Cup races. But Bascue, long retired from the sport and the transportation supervisor for the Whitehall School District, sensed that a local tradition was being lost. So six years ago he bought some sleds, received permission and ice time from the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), in Lake Placid, and launched the Whitehall High School bobsled team.
His recruiting pitch was, and still is, subtle. He just puts one of the school’s custom-painted sleds on display every fall. “That sled was sitting in the lobby of the elementary school,” says Shan Beebe, now a sophomore, “and I wanted to get in.”
Bascue soon had the whole community jumping aboard, donating money for equipment and racing suits, supporting the kids on their fund-raising drives, and providing chaperones for the long, wintry drives to Mount Van Hoevenberg and back.
Now, it’s taken on a life of its own. The dozen or so Whitehall student-athletes compete every week in a league that includes about 20 other sliders in ORDA’s junior bobsled program. They must meet the same academic standards as other Whitehall athletes. ORDA’s support has increased every year; in October, Leah Ford, a recently retired U.S. skeleton slider who oversees the ORDA junior program, put the Whitehall team through its paces on the dry-land push track at Lake Placid’s Olympic Training Center, helping them work on starts in a wheeled sled.
Bascue hopes other schools in the region sponsor teams, and former Olympic slider and ex-head of the U.S. Bobsled Federation, Matt Roy, is talking about starting one for the private Northwood School, in Lake Placid.
Some are dreaming bigger. ORDA’s Ford would like to see some Whitehall sliders develop into contenders at the 2012 Youth Olympics, in Innsbruck, Austria. And Sarah Hart, who competed for Whitehall for six years before graduating last spring, says, “I think there’s potential here for somebody to make an Olympic team.”
Indeed, Team USA’s most promising young bobsled driver, 22-year-old Schenectady native John Napier, raced in the ORDA junior program and may pilot a sled in the Vancouver Games.
Ryan Sweeney, the older brother of the Sister Act and one of the original high-school sliders, has the strength and speed to play running back at Castleton State College, in Vermont; he’s given thought to putting college on hold to train full time for a shot at the national bobsled team.
The team kindles interest in more than just bobsledding. Hart, a compact, powerful young woman with long hair and twinkling eyes, may use her great feel for the ice in a different Olympic event—skeleton, where competitors slide headfirst. She started thinking seriously about the switch while working as a volunteer at the world bobsled championships at the Lake Placid track last winter. “I saw that the bobsledders were all tall, big-boned girls,” she says. “The skeleton athletes look a lot more like me.”
Bobsledding is a thrill and is basically safe; Bascue says the common injuries are “normal sports bumps and bruises” from being jostled in the sled. But the teens appreciate the danger, especially when they graduate from the easy-to-handle junior sleds to the hair-trigger steering of the senior sleds. “I’ve always stressed that if you lose that sense of fear at the top of the hill, it’s time to quit,” Bascue says.
Even the best sliders must cope with that fear. Today Hart, pushed by Ryan Sweeney, is driving the sled through the toughest part of the course, Curves 17 and 18. Hart’s steering is just off, and the sled comes out of Curve 17 too close to the left wall in the belly of the straightaway, meaning they’ll hit Curve 18 too late, and too high. Watching from a catwalk above the curve, Bascue and Roy see the sled climb up Curve 18 and around the corner out of view. They listen, like a pair of cats hunting a mouse. The rumble of the runners turns into a smoother sound, and then …
“They’re over,” Bascue says. He hurries down the catwalk to see the white-and-red bobsled sliding on its side, backwards, to the scene of the crime at Curve 18, the two hardy teens still tucked inside.
The sled stops, and Sweeney unfurls first, followed by Hart. They walk a bit gingerly, and they’re required to see the ORDA medic to make sure all the parts still fit correctly. But they both give a thumbs-up, and there’s no doubt about one thing: they’ll ride again.
Because that’s what bobsledders do. You climb back up the hill and slide down again, for the challenge of going faster, but mostly for the fun of it. It’s an old Adirondack tradition.
Luke Cyphers is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. He lives in Plattsburgh.
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