Canadian-made bobsleighs shrouded in secrecy until 2010 Olympics

[SpongeG]

something else to wait for now

Canadian-made bobsleighs shrouded in secrecy until 2010 Olympics

CALGARY - It's dangerous to try and find out about made-in-Canada bobsleds.

"I can tell you, but I'd have to kill you," said Nick Ward, Bobsleigh Canada's high performance director. "We don't want other nations to know what we're doing." Bobsleigh has strong parallels with Formula One or NASCAR in that developing superior technology is part of the racing sport culture.

You don't want your competition to know what you've got up your sleeve, but you'd also like to know what the enemy has under the hood. There's a bit of espionage involved in sliding sports in the competition to build the fastest sled.

But Ward can confirm, without murder, that Canada's bobsleigh and skeleton teams have a program of building their own sleds for the first time.

"As one of the leading nations in the world in the sport, we've been at the whim of other manufacturers who don't have Canada at heart," he said. "We do have the expertise in Canada.

"The made-in-Canada program isn't to say everyone involved is Canadian, but that information stays in Canada."

The project will remain undercover and away from the prying eyes of other countries for now. The Canadian-made sleds won't be rolled out until the 2009-10 season, according to Ward.

So there won't be a sneak peek at the Viessman FIBT Bobsleigh and Skeleton World Cup starting Thursday at Canada Olympic Park.

"We're certainly not going to unveil new sleds at a World Cup in Calgary," pilot Pierre Lueders said. "That would be a mistake."

The Canadian-made sleds are funded by Own The Podium under its Top Secret program.

OTP is a $110-million, five-year business plan designed to help Canada win more medals than any other country at the 2010 Winter Olympic in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.

The Top Secret component is research and development in sport science.

OTP will spend about $3 million of its $23-million budget in 2007-08 on Top Secret.

About $1 million has been funnelled over the last three years into the made-in-Canada sleds, Ward said.

Lueders, an Olympic, world and World Cup champion in bobsleigh, used to tinker with and modify his sleds on his own.

"In terms of an actual program that will benefit not only myself but the other men's and women's teams, there hadn't been a concerted effort under one umbrella," he said. "So that is definitely something that's new.

"There's no denying we've got sled programs and projects for the hull, the frame, runners, better push technique, better training techniques. You try to optimize everything, whether it's the athlete at the start and even the push bars that they're pushing on.

"There are all these little projects within the project that might not necessarily be a Top Secret thing, but they're things we can look at now in a much shorter time frame because the funds are there."

Canada is just catching up to the world's best in the sport when it comes to sled development.

"One of the key things to understand is that the U.S. and Germany have been at this 10 years or longer," Ward said. "They've been doing this for a long time with bigger investment."

The reason you don't see freakish sleds that look like spaceships on the track is because the world governing body of the sport, FIBT, has restrictive rules on the dimensions of the sled and the makeup of runners.

Lueders aims to eliminate the two-tenths of second that kept him off the podium in four-man bobsleigh at the 2006 Olympics. He and brakeman Lascelles Brown won silver in the two-man event.

"What the East Germans did in 1984, where they were a second ahead of everybody, those days are pretty much over in bobsleighing," Lueders explained.

"You might find a hundredth of a second in the body shape, a hundredth in the cowling, maybe a couple hundredths at the start. So it's not going to be just one thing."

While Lueders and Ward were reluctant to provide details about the Canadian sled project, Lueders acknowledged it could work to his advantage if other countries were wondering what Canada was up to.

"If you get people thinking about what I'm doing, then they aren't thinking about what they should be doing themselves," he said.

"You can do more psychological damage if you get people thinking that you're up to something, if you act secretive or are covering your sled all the time, being really protective of your sled or shooing people away."

Those are practices Lueders employs.

But while the sled technology is important, it can't compensate for poor driving, he pointed out.

His two-man sled was 10 years old at the 2006 Olympics, but he and Lascelles still took the silver.

"What I've seen in the last years is there's been such an emphasis on making better sleds or sleds or runners that are faster, the drivers are forgetting how to drive well," Lueders said. "The biggest advantage for us will be, not the sleds that we drive, or some kind of widget or gadget that's going to make us better.

"It's going to be actually driving the track at Whistler or any other track - just outdriving people."

http://canadianpress.google.com/arti...9fwkFCzMYKnGUw

[mr.x]

ummm....sleds with rockets? and the athletes in even tighter spandex?