What Is Luge? What Is Skeleton?

Here’s how to keep the two sledding sports straight:

In luge, athletes speed down an icy track on a small sled.

In skeleton, they do it headfirst.

Luge is the more familiar of the two. It has a great name. Luge. It’s onomatopoetic, like a sled whooshing down an icy track. (It’s a Swiss term for a small sled.)

Luge is kind of like when you leapt onto your Flexible Flyer and steered down the hill with your feet, but these sleds weigh 50 pounds and can hit speeds of 90 miles per hour.

And then there’s doubles luge. Is that just one person lying on top of another as they race down the icy track? Yeah, pretty much.

They’ve been lugeing in the Olympics since 1964. A lot of people remember that some lugers in the 1970s wore Conehead-style helmets to gain an aerodynamic advantage. Those helmets are no longer allowed.

The start of the race is vital. The lugers push off with their hands as they sit facing forward on the sled and try to get going as fast as possible, aided by gloves that have spikes to grip the ice. They steer with their calves as they shoot around the corners of the course.

It can be a dangerous sport. In 2010, the day before the Olympic competition began in Canada, Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia flew off the track in a training run and crashed into a steel beam. He was killed.

The favorite in the doubles is Germany. The relay favorite is Germany. The men’s favorite is Johannes Ludwig of Germany. The women’s side, though, should be a razor-close battle between another German, Julia Taubitz, and an Austrian, Madeleine Egle.

The United States has done all right in the relay in the World Cup this season and could surprise with a medal. Americans have won six Olympic luge medals, but no golds.

In skeleton, the sledders lie on their stomachs and careen down the course headfirst. After cameos at the St. Moritz Olympics in 1928 and 1948, skeleton joined the Games permanently in 2002.

The unusual name may have arisen because the early sleds reminded some of skeletons, or from a corruption of a Norwegian word for sled, “kjaelke.”

Though steering accurately around the turns is important — sliders control the sled with small movements of their heads and shoulders — a lot of success or failure comes down to the start. It’s a matter of how fast can the sledders run 25 or so meters, and how efficiently can they convert that foot speed into speed on the course? To help them grip the ice at the start, athletes’ shoes have up to 300 tiny spikes on them.

Because sledders are going headfirst, skeleton creates a particular danger of head injuries.

One man — Martins Dukurs of Latvia — has dominated skeleton, winning 11 of 13 World Cups since 2010. But he has found frustration at the Olympics. He was the favorite at both the 2010 Vancouver Games and 2014 Sochi Olympics, and in both cases he finished second to a slider with home-ice advantage. In 2018 he was fourth. Nonetheless, at age 37, he is favored to finally get his gold this year.

Kimberley Bos of the Netherlands is favored in the women’s skeleton.