Mountain, snow, sleigh – that’s all you need
Last weekend the Alpine tobogganing World Cup opener took place in Winterleiten in Styria. Until a few months ago the sport was still called natural track tobogganing, but the International Luge Federation FIL put an end to it at this year’s congress in Tampere, Finland. The reason for the name change, which was accompanied by a new logo: A modern image brings better marketing opportunities.
Until the early 1960s, there was no distinction between artificial and natural tracks in tobogganing. But when he won the Olympics in 1964, everything changed. Because the tobogganers shared the ice track with the bobsledders at the Olympics, this now also set the trend for tobogganing. Racing on natural tracks essentially became a second-class competition. Unfair, for several reasons.
First of all, toboggan races on the natural track are more popular because everyone can toboggan there without risking their lives. They are also more spectacular. In principle, any closed and secured snowy mountain road can become a railway. Competition tracks must be three meters wide; the curve elevations that are so characteristic of the ice track are not permitted. This allows for different lines, spectacular drifting through the curves and more scope for tactical maneuvers. The tracks are around 1,000 meters long, the journey time is just over a minute, and the time intervals are usually significantly longer than on the artificial tracks. It’s no coincidence that people talk about “rally sport on ice”.
The FIL has been trying for decades to make alpine tobogganing an Olympic sport, but so far without success. The International Olympic Committee has enough to worry about when it comes to luge athletes. It is always the same nations that win the medals, especially Germany, and the performance density is low. It’s no different with alpine tobogganing, except that the German team has little to report here. The biennial European and World Championships as well as the World Cup are usually won by Austria and Italy (read: South Tyrol). The two countries share more than 95 percent of all titles between them. From the 1990s onwards, the only serious competition came from Russia. In the port city of Kandalaksha in Murmansk Oblast, a strong team grew up, from which Lyubov Panyutina won the first World Cup medal in 1990, at that time for the Soviet Union. From 2000 to 2015, Yekaterina Lavrentyeva dominated women’s competitions. She won the World Cup four times, the European Championships six times and the overall World Cup twelve times, without interruption from 2006 to 2015.
Of course, there were no Russian athletes at the start of this year’s World Cup races in Winterleiten. The FIL is particularly strict when it comes to excluding Russian athletes; the association did not want to let them compete even under a neutral flag until it was forced to do so by the International Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). But it is still up to association officials to determine what counts as neutrality and what doesn’t. Just a few days ago, Russian athletes were sent home from the Luge World Cup in Lake Placid because they did not meet the FIL’s criteria. Alpine tobogganers didn’t even register for the World Cup. The financial risk is too great in a fringe sport like this.
In the absence of the Russian team, 41 athletes from twelve countries competed in Winterleiten. Thanks to funding from the FIL, 18-year-old New Zealander Louie Coburn and a similarly young team from the USA also took part. You can spend the World Cup winter in the Alps. All alpine tobogganing competitions take place in Austria and South Tyrol; The highlight of the season is the European Championships in Lasa (South Tyrol) at the end of January.
The German centers of alpine tobogganing are – unsurprisingly – located in Upper Bavaria. All German participants in the races in Winterleiten belong to the RC Rottach-Egern or the WSV Unterammergau. Some are very young, Ruby Carla Holland-Moritz and Magdalena Enig (both WSV Unterammergau) are just 15 years old. Like most of their teammates, they finished in midfield. The outlier was the performance of the 24-year-old former junior world champion Lisa Walch (RC Rottach-Egern), who finished fourth on the podium in both competitions held in Winterleiten. On Sunday, he was only three hundredths of a second shy of third place.
The winners in the two individual races for men and women as well as in the gender-neutral doubles? All from Austria and Italy. At least under a new logo.
