By Mitch Phillips
LONDON (Reuters) -After bobsleigh and skeleton hit Cortina d’Ampezzo last week, luge – the feet-first one – gets its first live taste of the new track this weekend via a test event for February’s Winter Olympics that doubles up as the sport’s World Cup opener.
The season had been due to start in Innsbruck, Austria, two weeks ago, but issues with the track led to a cancellation – the races being shifted to the German resort of Winterberg on December 5-7.
As a result, this weekend’s test event has been upgraded to a World Cup event, with Olympic qualification points up for grabs at the newly built Eugenio Monti track named after Italy’s most decorated bobsleigh athlete.
Last year there were fears that the sliding events would have to be shifted to Lake Placid in the United States after work to build the new facility, on the site of the demolished 100-year-old original track that closed in 2008, fell behind.
However, everything was passed off early in 2025 and now the talk is not of “will it be ready” but “how is it to race on?”
As ever, Germany is expected to be the dominant nation at the Olympics, having, in its various guises, taken a remarkable 38 of the 52 available luge golds since the sport joined in 1964, including 11 of the last 12.
Next year there will be five to shoot for, with the introduction of women’s doubles, and among the favourites to keep the medals rolling will be double overall World Cup winner and triple 2025 world champion Max Langenhan.
“Everyone will love the whole setting with the mountains around it and it’s great to have a new track,” Langenhan told the International Luge Federation.
“It’s too early to say definitively whether the track suits me but what we’ve seen so far promises a lot of excitement because it’s going to be very tight and every mistake will be punished.”
Although Germany will be favourites across the board, Austrian athletes have been showing good form and Langenhan expects a stiff challenge.
“They’ve closed the gap on us at the start and lately they’ve been skiing incredibly well, like they are on rails,” he said. “In recent years they were all world champions in training but then made a lot of mistakes in races. But you can see now they have done their homework.”
One of those challenging Austrians is Wolfgang Kindl, now 37 but a mixed doubles world champion this year 15 years after competing at the Vancouver Olympics.
“We heard beforehand that it was a very easy track but I personally think it has pitfalls,” said the Beijing 2022 silver medallist behind Germany’s Johannes Ludwig.
“The upper section in particular is technically demanding and you have to have the line right in the first curves.”
Women’s doubles has appeared in the world championships for the last four years – the men’s began in the first worlds in 1955. Austrians Selina Egle and Lara Kipp won the last two world titles as well as dominating last season’s World Cup and look strong favourites for the inaugural gold in the event.
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Toby Davis)
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