COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 12:55 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2006

Jim Litke

CESANA, Italy - Katie Uhlaender’s Olympic experience sounds life a riff borrowed from an old blues tune:

If not for gravity, she wouldn’t have had much help at all.

The U.S. skeleton racer had precious little experience in the big time, she came here without a teammate and her coach was fired a week before the Games started. Chaos, it seemed for the longest time, was her constant companion.

“The biggest lesson I learned,” Uehlander said after finishing sixth Thursday, “is to rise above it.”

It’s one thing to say plenty of 21-year-olds have to grow up in a hurry. It’s another, though, to have to do it sliding down an icy track inches above the ground at speeds nearing 80 mph.

And maybe that’s the most frustrating thing about having to learn anything on the fly; by the time Uehlander truly understood what it would take to win in a sport she’d been competing in for just three seasons, she was hurtling through the sixth of 19 turns on her second run.

“Too late,” she said, scowling, “to catch up to myself.”

If that sounds like a contradiction, that’s skeleton in a nutshell. The trick is to find the best line down the course as fast as possible and hold it as long as momentum allows. To do that, sliders have to be sprinters at the top of each run, cranking up the speed with a few driving, heart-pumping strides. Yet the moment they leave the chute and plop, face-first, onto their sleds, the best ones function like sandbags in the trunk of a car, subtly shifting their weight from side to side to keep skidding at a minimum. The less they move, ultimately, the faster they go.

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Speed was what attracted Uhlaender, the daughter of former major league baseball player Ted Uhlaender, to skeleton in the first place. She was a skier at age 2, a baseball player after that, and thinking about snowboarding toward the Olympics when the adrenaline rush of a sled run hooked her. Uhlaender had been competing for less than a month when she won the U.S. Junior Nationals, and she couldn’t wait to test herself at the next level. But even she couldn’t have known at the time how quickly her apprenticeship would go.

Both the U.S. men’s and women’s team won gold at the 2002 Winter Games, and the women added a silver as well. That meant Uhlaender, despite a promising start in the sport, would likely wind up biding her time behind both Tristan Gale and Lea Ann Parsley, who finished 1-2 at Salt Lake.

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But Parsley segued into coaching and then Gale, who struggled to find her form on the World Cup circuit last season, was having trouble convincing then-head coach Tim Nardiello to give her enough starts as qualifying loomed. Fast-emerging Noelle Pikus-Pace moved into the top spot, but she was sidetracked with a broken leg in a freak accident at the bottom of the track during training in Calgary. The fast-improving Uhlaender moved into the void, but that’s when the real trouble began.

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