RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
Sled-racing at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, next month, will look very different from races at the 2010 games in Vancouver. Both games were marred by the death of one athlete and by many other serious crashes.
As North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports, the controversy in Vancouver is still sending shock waves through the sport.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: The first thing you have to know about sled racing is that it's little like NASCAR. Tracks built all over the world, including the new one in Sochi, are really different.
STEVE HOLCOMB: They all kind of have their own personalities. And each engineer is different. Has their - puts their own like mentality and mindset into designing it.
MANN: That's Steve Holcomb who won a gold medal in 4-man bobsled at the Vancouver Olympics four years ago. That track on a mountainside in Whistler was designed to revolutionize the sport, making it more aggressive, boosting top speeds from around 85 miles an hour to more than 95 miles an hour.
Justin Olsen, a bobsledder who raced on Holcomb's team in Vancouver says every run in 2010 was about survival.
JUSTIN OLSEN: Hold onto something, bite your teeth, close your eyes, do something, we're either going to make it or we're not. Most tracks you go through the most difficult portion kind of early on. And Vancouver just, you know, it just never lets up.
MANN: John Morgan, a former bobsledder who now works as a sled racing analyst for sports networks, says that high-octane, X-games edge was by design.
JOHN MORGAN: Canadians wanted to build the biggest, baddest, fastest track ever and they did.
MANN: Morgan says sled racing is inherently risky - danger is part of the sport. His own brother died in a bobsled accident in Italy in the early '80s. But Morgan says there's agreement now, that for all but the top athletes, Vancouver's track was too aggressive.
MORGAN: It's a great track for the elite top 10, 15 athletes in each discipline. But it was too much for the, what I call second level athlete that qualifies into the Olympic Games.
MANN: The design sparked horror and controversy when an inexperienced young luge racer from the Republic of Georgia crashed on a training run. Howard Berkes reported on the tragedy for NPR.
HOWARD BERKES, BYLINE: The violent death of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili prompted Olympic organizers to reconfigure the luge competition, raising to 12 feet the side wall that the young Georgian catapulted over at 90 miles an hour into a steel pole.
MANN: Steve Holcomb, captain of America's bobsled team, says fall-out from Vancouver also changed the way sledding sports will look on the new track in Sochi.
HOLCOMB: Sochi, they were in the process of building it as Vancouver was taking place. Sochi was supposed to be faster than Vancouver.
MANN: Before Georgian sledder's death, the plan was for bobsleds in Sochi to hit speeds topping 100 miles an hour. Holcomb says that escalation, that international one-upmanship, was quickly scrapped.
HOLCOMB: They told Sochi to tone it down a little bit. So they actually had to change the design a little bit in putting three uphill sections to slow the sled down. Not good for the spectators, probably - they like the crashes.
MANN: So the Sochi track's track design is extremely rare in sliding sports. Most tracks don't even have one uphill section, Sochi has three. Justin Olsen says viewers won't see as many wrecks or the same kind of breakneck speed, but they will see sled drivers navigating incredibly complex twists and turns.
OLSEN: There's this one curve, you're going uphill and into a curve that kind of peaks and then goes back down hill. So you think about it, you're losing speed, losing speed, losing speed, then when you go into the curve, you lose more speed but you got to time it coming out.
MANN: The Sochi track is so unique that American sledders worry it could give a huge home-court advantage to the Russians, who've had more time to practice on the course and perfect their runs.
For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann.
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