For American doubles lugers, it all started as a joke. Maybe it’s fitting for a goofy-looking discipline where two sliders are stacked on top of each other and slide down an icy track at speeds that are usually only seen in the Park City area on Interstate 80 heading down Parleys Canyon.
“We used to say it as a joke all the time when we were younger, ‘Oh, we’ll do doubles and stuff,’ while we were racing each other in singles,’” said Zack DiGregorio, who is partnered with Sean Hollander. “And then, a year before the Olympics, Coach came up to us and offered us the chance to do doubles together, and when he offered it, we right away said yes.”
“We’ve both been sliding singles for – I’ve been sliding for 16 years now – and we talked about it as a joke for a while,” added Summer Britcher, who partnered with Emily Sweeney. “And then this spring, OK, we’re going to give it a try. Why not? It’s something new, it’s the first year in the Olympic quad, so we can kind of pull our focus away from our regular discipline a little bit. Just kind of made a decision and fully committed to it when the IOC announced that it would be an Olympic event along with men’s doubles.”
All four competed on home ice on Friday and Saturday at the Utah Olympic Park during the World Cup’s stop in Park City. DiGregorio and Hollander finished fourth in men’s doubles and seventh in the sprint event, while Britcher and Sweeney scored fourth-place finishes in both of their races.
DiGregorio and Hollander’s transition to doubles luge wasn’t exactly smooth.
“It was pretty hard the first couple of years – it’s a lot of hard crashes when you’re still figuring it out,” Hollander said. “But we’ve thankfully been able to keep the shiny side down this year.”
For aerodynamic reasons, the taller person is the person on top. Hollander previously competed in doubles as the man on top, but in this partnership, he’s now on the bottom.
“It was a whole new world,” Hollander said. “You have to feel the sled more, you have to feel the track more. It’s more visualization and stuff like that.”
The person on top is the one who can see, so steering can be a challenge. At the high speeds the sled travels, there’s no time to verbally communicate ahead of a turn. Instead, Hollander takes cues from DiGregorio’s body language.
“I follow his shoulders and his head,” Hollander said. “He leans into a curve, kind of gives me a cue.”
DiGregorio is attached to the sled as the top man, and the position comes with a few changes from singles.
“It’s a weird one,” DiGregorio said. “You’re basically fully exposed. Any wall you hit, you’re hitting. If you crash, you’ve got your weight, Sean’s weight and the sled’s weight all on top of you.
“You’re higher up, you’re seeing above the short walls of curves that you never have before, so it feels different that way. You can see more because even when your head’s all the way back on Sean’s chest, it’s not as far back as you would be in singles.”
The two had their struggles last year, finishing 26th in the overall standings as they adjusted to doubles and appearing on the World Cup circuit. However, it did include a trip to the Olympics, where they finished 11th in doubles and seventh in the team relay. This year, with more knowledge of the tracks, more experience under their belt and a couple of stops in North America, their confidence has grown immensely.
“We go to a new track, and we’ve already been there,” DiGregorio said. “Last year, we were going to all these new tracks each week. And now, it’s repeating, and once you have that, it really helps you get more comfortable right from that first run, where you have gameplan going into it and then you can execute better throughout the week.”
The frigid temperatures and their past experiences with home ice in Park City finally gave DiGregorio and Hollander a leg up on the competition. Whether it was competing away from North America last year or going up against teams who have been competing in doubles for years, that hasn’t always been the case. But in Park City, they shined, scoring their best World Cup finish in fourth.
“It’s so nice, and the ice conditions played so well into our advantage because we have so many runs here,” Hollander said. “When the ice gets so hard, it’s just so hard to find grip with our sharp steel. It played into our court and took advantage of it.”
For Britcher and Sweeney, this is the first year women’s doubles luge has been on the World Cup circuit. They’re both luge veterans on the singles side and have spent years together on the road, so the all-important chemistry side of the equation has already been solved.
“We’ve been teammates for a very long time, we’ve gone to two Olympics together, we’ve been on the podium together, we’ve messed up together,” Britcher said. “We had to put in a lot of work into learning how to communicate as teammates that are competing against each other all the time. So when we decided, hey, we’re going to be teammate-teammates, we’re going to do doubles together, it was kind of like we had already done all the hard work. We already figured out how to communicate well and work together and accomplish success as competitive teammates.”
Between the start and finish lines, Sweeney summed up her job as the woman on the bottom. Britcher added that since Sweeney has more contact with the sled, she can shift her body into curves.
“At the start, we’re both pulling,” she said. “I have straps that kind of are attached to Summer’s hands, so when she pulls, I have contact as well. I’m helping propel the sled. And then once we lay down, I’m more of the blending on and off the curves, the smaller drives. And when she needs help on the big drives, then I kind of step in as well.”
Britcher’s first impressions of doubles luge weren’t positive, but with time, she’s gotten a feel for it.
“When Emily and I decided to do doubles, I said, ‘OK, you’re going to have to give me two days where I’m just freaking out, and I’ll be on board,’” Britcher said. “I was freaking out for the first probably two sessions.”
The experiment has mostly been a success so far, even if it has come with some frustrating finishes. Britcher and Sweeney have recorded four straight fourth-place finishes and are still looking for their first trip to the podium together. But Britcher sees the potential.
“We’ve been showing great speed, we have great potential, it’s just challenging to put it together in a race,” she said. “But that’s normal. It took me a long time to be able to put together two race runs and get on the podium. To be close to the podium so quickly is definitely a good sign of promise.”
Britcher and Sweeney are still racing singles, which has had its demands. For example, on Saturday alone, they had two singles runs, a doubles sprint run and then a singles sprint run. But there’s also something rewarding about an experiment like this.
“The thing that’s unique about Summer and I is coming together, we’re old to start something new like this, right?” Sweeney said. “But it’s been really cool to see how we’ve developed our communication styles. We’re coming together not as kids who don’t really know how to talk to each other yet. We’re coming together a little longer, later down the road. It’s been fun to see how well we’ve just clicked, especially going from competitors to teammates.”