USA Luge’s search for speed off to wind tunnels of Southern California, far from ice and snow

US luge team going high-tech for medal chase

After the World Cup luge season ends in the frosty Italian Alps this weekend, Mark Grimmette will pack away his mittens for a few days and start heading halfway around the world to breezy, sunny San Diego.

Once there, Grimmette will lie down and relax.

A quick vacation after a long season? Not hardly.

The soon-to-be five-time U.S. luge Olympian will be hard at work on Feb. 3, trying on at least three different bodytight suits that serve as a racer’s uniform in a high-tech wind tunnel, looking to find those tiny fractions of seconds that could help him or another teammate find the podium at the fast-approaching Vancouver Games.

“My job’s pretty simple,” Grimmette said. “I just have to lie there on the sled and be as still as possible.”

Simple, sure, but vital considering luge speeds on the track at the Whistler Sliding Center flirt with 100 mph — almost unheard of for the sport.

“The upcoming round of aerodynamic testing will be especially important,” said Gordy Sheer, an Olympic medalist and now USA Luge’s director of marketing.

Most sports measure time to the tenth or hundredth of a second. Luge measures to the thousandth, simply because the line between winning and losing can be incredibly slim. So to find a sliver of time here or there, USA Luge is heading back to a place it has visited many times before, the San Diego Air and Space Technology Center.

Grimmette will squeeze his body into suits of different fabrics and styles, made by companies from all over the world. To common fans, they all would look pretty much the same, but to racers the differences can be colossal.

Luge racers used to wear a suit with an outer coating of a rubberized material, only to have those banned more than a decade ago. Modern suits — most of them are made of a Spandex-type material — still have some rubberizing, although it’s on the inside and solely to limit how much air comes through the material as racers hit high speeds in often-frigid air.

Grimmette estimated a good suit can shave as much as three-tenths of a second per run, a huge amount of time in any sliding sport.

“Having the best material going into the Olympics, it’s very important,” Grimmette said.

Much like in swimming and skiing, where the suit material has been all the rage in recent years, the same applies in luge.

As in all sliding sports, aerodynamics are essential, and some racers will try just about anything to stop the trackside clock a few mini-ticks earlier — shaving arms and legs is common in skeleton, bobsled push athletes always tuck their heads as low as possible to minimize drag, luge racers wear booties with no treads — all in the name of gliding more smoothly.

So in San Diego, at a facility also used to measure and experiment with the aerodynamic workings of missiles, jets and airplanes, engineers will measure drag off Grimmette’s race suit. He’s a doubles slider, so Sheer will be on the sled with Grimmette, trying to simulate a race condition as much as possible.

Aerodynamic engineers will turn the wind to upward of 90 mph, taking into account all the variables such as Grimmette’s suit material and position on the sled. They’ll then be able to tell which mix creates the least amount of drag, which theoretically would show which mix will create the most speed at the Whistler Sliding Center.

Wind-tunnel testing is hardly used only by sliders — even seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong has been to the facility.

“Testing is really critical,” Sheer said.

And even though the Olympics are nearly here, USA Luge has no concerns about getting new suits if testing dictates they’re needed.

“They can manufacture them for us pretty quickly,” Grimmette said. “As far as the suit goes, it’s something that we just put on for the race and that’s it. It’s not something that we need to break in or have to have anything specially done to it. We just put it on.”