An American's guide to the Bobsled/Skeleton World Championships

This year's bobsled and skeleton world championships are in Lake Placid—a huge advantage for Team USA, and mayyyyyybe a preview of next year's Olympics?

They’re still letting the United States host major international sporting events, for now, and one of them starts today: The 2025 IBSF World Championships at Mt. Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, New York.

Photo credit: Ken Childs, Sliding on Ice.

These are the world championships in bobsled and skeleton. (But not luge. That’s a different international organization.) The event started today and will go through March 16th, next weekend. I believe most of the event will be streaming on Youtube, which is nice!

It’s a pretty big deal when you get to host a World Championships, so I reached out to Ken Childs, who runs Slding on Ice, a website dedicated to sliding sports coverage. He’s in Lake Placid covering the World Champs, and he’s live-posting the world champs on BlueSky!

I gave Ken a call 11 hours into his 13-hour drive from his home in North Carolina to upstate New York (he’d just passed Albany) to ask him some basics about these world champs and the sport in general. (The answers have been shortened. Also I made my questions sound professional when in reality I was just like “hey so what’s up with this?”)

These are the first World Championships in the United States since 2012. How big an advantage is it to host one of these on your home track?

Ken: It’s absolutely huge. The team’s based out of Lake Placid, you’re going to do most of your training in Lake Placid, that’s where the bigger training facilities are. Most of these pilots can drive the track with their eyes closed. You’re gonna see people that normally would be maybe 10th or 11th, contending for top 5 because it’s their home track.

The bobsled team didn’t even race in the final World Cup event of the year. They all came home to get in an extra week or two of sliding in Lake Placid, and you can do that because it’s your track.

And Lake Placid is a different type of track than most of what’s in Europe. A lot of European tracks have something called the Kreisel, a big circle, 270, 300, 360 degrees, and they have multiple oscillations—you go to the corner, come down, go back up, and back down. Lake Placid is almost entirely single pressure curves. That’s another thing that lends an advantage to the Americans.

And it’s not just the Americans. Brazil’s Edson Bindilatti, four-time Olympian, he’s based out of Lake Placid. He’s not going to be contending for medals, but you’re going to see a Brazilian sled in the top 10.

I’ve only ever watched sliding sports on TV. What’s it actually like to watch in person?

TV does not do it justice. When you stand right next to the track, you can get up on the rail, within four feet of the track. You can hear the sled coming from about five curves away, it’s loud, louder than you think. The sled’s not a solid thing, you can hear it rattling. You really get the sensation of the speed, which is like 75, 80 miles per hour.

And if you stand at the start, at the top, that’s one of the places you need to go, especially in bobsled. There’s a horde of people, and it’s loud. There’s a moment when the bobsledders have a little cadence—they say “front set, back set,” whatever—and then there’s a tap on the sled, and then there’s just an explosion of energy from the sled. And in Lake Placid, when the Americans are going off, you can hear that from anywhere on the mountain.

At last year’s World Championships, Germany won 11 of 12 possible medals in the bobsled—three medal sweeps and one event where they won gold and bronze while Team USA’s Elana Meyers Taylor won silver. How good are they, and why are they so good?

In the men’s bobsled, I expect a big showing from Germany’s Francesco Friedrich and Johannes Lochner, it’s probably their last World Championships. . Friedrich is the greatest bobsledder of all time, hard stop. Part of me feels bad for Lochner, because if it wasn’t for Friedrich, he’d be the top German for the last six or seven years, but he just happens to be racing at the same time as this guy that is literally the best guy who’s ever done it.

Like, the Americans, we don’t start our skeleton athletes until after college. The Germans and the Austrians too, they start young enough that they don’t really have a prior life. And with German athletes, they’re very much supported if you’re a top level athlete. You can get a job, you study to be a policeman or something like that, and they give you the time to be an athlete, and then in the offseason, you do your police work. There’s not as much as a hustle to try to get funding.

On the American side, there’s no money coming in from the government, it’s all private. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to eat lunch today at a place called The Greeks in Lake Placid, they sponsor a friend of mine, Nick Tucker, he’s the third-ranked American skeleton athlete and just missed the cut to make the World Championships.

All the little businesses in Lake Placid are all helping out in some way. Which is neat, but it’s also infuriating that it comes to that.

Team USA has the most Olympic skeleton medals of any country and the third-most bobsled medals… but they’ve dropped off in the last decade or so. Are any American sliders looking good?

The German women have absolutely dominated two-woman bobsled this year, but that said: Lake Placid. This is a home track. (2022 monobob gold medalist) Kailee Humphries has always been good there. She’s back from maternity leave, and her starts have been getting better, she’s gonna have some great talent in the back of her sled, and it’s a driver’s track that plays right into her hands. (2022 monobob silver medalist) Elana Meyers Taylor has been sliding better and better all season, she’s back to form.

And Kaysha Love has been better in the monobob than the two-woman, and it’s her home track. I could see any of the American women on the podium, and I could see any of them winning. It’s going to be them and the Germans.

I would expect to see Austin Florian lingering around in the skeleton. It’s his home track, he’s a big pusher, he’s gonna have a look at it. The men’s side is so tight, you could give me a bag with ten names in it and if I drew one out I could look at it and go, “yeah, I could see that happening.”

On the women’s side in skeleton, I would not be surprised if we have a medal. Mystique Ro is an absolute beast off the top, she can slide, and she’s won medals. Katie Uhlaender doesn’t have the start anymore, but it’s her home track, she won a world championship here 13 years ago, and she’s been on the podium the last couple of years.

One of the cool things about skeleton and bobsled is that so many of the athletes are in second careers from other sports. Are there any good stories we should know about?

Bobsled is almost always track athletes. (Rodger popping in here: 2012 Olympic 4x400 silver medalist Manteo Mitchell is competing, as is Lolo Jones, who has won world championships in the 100m hurdles and the 2-woman bobsled.)

One of the Brits in skeleton, Tabitha Stoeker, her previous career, she was a trapeze artist, circus trapeze. And now she does this. Marcus Wyatt actually used to play American football in Great Britain. Debora Annen from Switzerland, came from handball. She kept getting hurt doing handball, and her coach was like, you should do bobsled, it’ll be safer, which is absolutely not true.

I’ve seen stories that the sliding events in next year’s Olympics might be in Lake Placid if Italy doesn’t build their track in time. What’s going on there?

It’s looking more and more like the Olympic sliding events will be in Italy. But the track is not done. They’ve done a very good job in a short amount of time… but man, it is far closer than anyone wants it to be, judging from what I’ve heard and seen in pictures.

The first test event in luge is three weeks away, and the track is not done. Supposedly the cooling system is all set up and they can make ice, and the last number I heard was they are 85 to 90 percent done with the track. Other courses will have a big start house with a warmup area, an office, whatever, and there’s none of that right now, it’s just the track and they’re trying to get it knocked out.

The way it was worded to me is that the Italians had X amount of money for the track, found out it might cost more than that, and bailed on the track and took that money and put it towards upgrading other facilities. And then the local governments came in and said, well, “this is completely unacceptable, we’ll find the money, build the damn track!” And we’re a year and a half, two years out from the Olympics. So the IOC said cool, but we’re going to need a backup plan, because this has never been done before. And Lake Placid said hey, we’re ready. We just hosted the FISU winter games in 2023, we got world champs coming up, we can do it right now. I think that sparked a little something under the Italians’ ass. I’ve read some things in the Italian press, where just the thought of moving those events to Lake Placid, everyone is just aghast.

I think it’ll be in Italy, but if you asked me to put money on it, I would not. We’re at the point in time where if a guy in Italy moving dirt in a wheelbarrow gets the sniffles, it might not happen.