A Post About Sledding and Latvians

The sledding track at Sochi is, as every sledding track is, a place of winter Olympic excitement, what with American Noelle Pikus-Pace's exhilarating skeleton run that gave her a silver medal (the Utahan Pikus-Pace is probably the most famous Mormon on ice since the Osmonds attempted figure skating) and Matt Antoine's bronze medal victory in the same event.  Alexander Tretiakov of Russia made history by winning his country's first medal's skeleton gold medal.  The Germans, meanwhile, swept the luge events, wining gold in all of them.  And, Erin Hamlin became the first American woman to win a luge mdeal (bronze, women's singles) of any sort.  

The most interesting story out of Sochi sledding, though, may be the Dukurs brothers of Latvia, Martins and Tomass, who raced in the skeleton competition and, in training runs, both made times of 57.6 seconds on February 10 and tied each other again on February 12 with a time of 57.01.  Martins Dukurs has joked that it was the result of he and Tomass using the same equipment, but no one is joking about Martins Dukurs' victories: seven championship gold medals and two silver Olympic medals.  His older brother Tomass has only won four European championships medals - two silver, two bronze - but he's still no failure.

Sledding in Latvia, apparently, is all in the family.  The Dukurs brothers' father, a former bobsledding brakeman, manages the skeleton track at the sledding center the Latvian town of Sigulda, which was built in the Soviet era.  (Sledding in Sigulda dates back to the 1880s, when  Latvia was part of the Russian Empire.)  The Sics brothers, silver medalists in the double luge at the Vancouver Games, also trained there.  Both fraternal pairs experimented with a four-man bobsled to see if they could ride it down without crashing; apparently, such a sled had never been tried on the track before.  The test run was a success, and Dainis Dukurs stated that it proved that the track was suitable for four-man teams but need improvements to perfect it.  It has since been modernized.  

All right, you all knew that I was headed toward bringing up . . . Janis Kipurs, the Latvian bobsledder who competed for the Soviet Union in the 1984 and 1988 Winter Olympics (winning in 1988 the gold medal in two-man bobsledding and bronze in the four-man competition), competed for an independent Latvia in the 1992 Winter Games and carried the Latvian flag at the opening ceremony, and, in his spare time, discovered penicillin.  

No, not really, but here's something about Janis Kipurs that's completely true: He was the driving coach for the U.S. women's bobsled team from 2010 to 2012.   And with bobsledding about to begin in Sochi, we could very well see his coaching reap big rewards on the track for America.  Hopefully, Janis himself will get interviewed on NBC.  

Janis Kipurs - a name worth repeating, if only because it sounds so whimsically musical when you do repeat it.  "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers." "YON-is KIP-ers."