She plans to write a book in which she will explore how the U.S. Wakefield says her experiences should help her scholarship. She’s been in charge of timing the races, measuring the temperature of the sled’s blades, and making sure that the luger leaves the starting line within 30 seconds of being called.ĭr. Since then, she has stood outdoors in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees centigrade to work the 1992, 1994, and 1998 Olympic trials and several world-championship contests. Wakefield underwent more training and testing to become a judge with the Federation Internationale de Luge. They spent a weekend of intense training - 14 hours of classroom work and an all-nighter preparing for a written exam - to become luge officials. Wakefield went back to Lake Placid, joined in a class with about 10 other would-be officials - former lugers training to be coaches, mothers of lugers, a high-school physical-education teacher, a business executive - and memorized every nuance of every rule. Back in 1988, and even today, fans weren’t exactly coming out in droves to watch luge, and they certainly weren’t lining up to spend a weekend learning the rules.ĭr. The association needed officials with her enthusiasm. What she got was a letter asking her to train as an official. Luge Association, asking for more information. “I was kind of tickled that this guy would take the time to talk about this sport,” she says. Then, when she met John Owens, one of the lugers who qualified for the Olympics that day, she was hooked. The answer: by pressing the blades with their legs and shoulders. Among other things, she wondered how they steered at such breakneck speed. When she saw the luge competitors in Lake Placid, they sparked her curiosity. She was also starting graduate work in history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she wrote her dissertation on “Playing to Win: Sports and the American Military, 1898-1945.” At the time, she was an unhappy lawyer about to leave a practice in Rochester, N.Y. Taking a break from skiing and bobsledding, she had joined a small group watching the country’s top lugers compete for a spot on the U.S. Wakefield’s first encounter with luge was in 1988, during a vacation in Lake Placid, N.Y. Her teaching duties mean that she must watch this year’s winter Olympics from home, but she will be an official at the 2002 games, in Salt Lake City.ĭr. She’s also a sports historian, teaching her students about the role of race, class, and gender in athletics. Her parents propped her up as a baby to listen to games on the radio. Wakefield is a die-hard sports fan, although at first, baseball and football were more her style. So how did someone who teaches American history, in a region not known for winter sports, become so passionate about luge?įor starters, Dr. “The sport is timed to the thousandth of a second, so the teeniest, tiniest advantage is significant,” Dr. Here’s a little-known fact: If the steel blade on one sled is just 5 degrees centigrade higher than the air temperature, the racer faces disqualification for having an unfair advantage - the warmer the blades, the more water forms in the track under the luge, and the faster the ride. Wakefield, who is an official in international luge competitions, sits up and starts describing the technical rules of luge. The next moment, she leans back in her chair and laughs as she mimics a television commercial’s take on the matter: “When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty. The assistant professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University talks about the adrenaline-pumping speed of the luge, in which a racer wearing a skin-tight uniform rides supine on a tiny sled down a twisting, icy chute at up to 80 miles an hour. Wanda Ellen Wakefield is deadly serious about luge, but she also understands why many Americans find the sport slightly comical.
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