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Before he was banned for gambling, baseball player Pete Rose was famous for the headfirst slide, the definition of a player who puts it all out on the field. Here's an Olympic sport that consists entirely of a headfirst slide. Competitors at the Olympics in South Korea will ride sleds on their stomachs headfirst 90 miles an hour. NPR's Melissa Block met Americans training for skeleton.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Sled in track, sled in track from start one. This is Katie Uhlaender.
KATIE UHLAENDER: Hi, I'm Katie Uhlaender - three-time Olympian, World Cup champion and world champion for the sport of skeleton.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLED ROLLING)
UHLAENDER: I go headfirst on ice, and I love it.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Katie U. will be through curve 19, crossing the finish line with a down time of 55.61.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: That's right. In the time it's taken us to get this far in this story - 55 seconds - a skeleton athlete will have hurdled down a mile-long track headfirst, face-down, at speeds up to 90 miles an hour.
UHLAENDER: It is the perfect combination of meathead and freestyle as an athlete. Honestly, like, and I think due to my short attention span, it suits me well.
BLOCK: Katie Uhlaender is 33, her hair dyed a vivid crimson. Growing up, she competed in just about everything - skiing, powerlifting, track, baseball.
UHLAENDER: Yeah. I played baseball all the way until I realized I was 5-foot-3 and female and the major leagues were a far reach (laughter).
BLOCK: After high school, she turned to skeleton and found it was a natural fit. She zoomed up the ranks super fast. When she's racing, Uhlaender loves submitting to her fear, embracing it.
UHLAENDER: I start chasing the speed and just dancing with the curves. It's like those dreams where you're flying, except if you mess up here, you're going to hit a wall (laughter).
BLOCK: Speaking of which, picture this scene a few years back. Another skeleton athlete, Savannah Graybill, is racing right here in Lake Placid. It's the first time her parents have come to watch her race. They're standing just inches away, watching as her sled slams into a wall and hits a patch of exposed concrete.
SAVANNAH GRAYBILL: And sparks fly everywhere.
BLOCK: Her folks run to the finish line terrified.
GRAYBILL: And they're freaking out, you know. We just saw sparks. We saw you come through here. We thought you were dead. I'm like, oh, no. It was fine. And they're just, you know, looking at me like, what are you - you're crazy. You're literally crazy.
BLOCK: So is it as scary as it looks?
MATT ANTOINE: Watching skeleton is maybe a little more scary than actually doing skeleton. Even for myself, sometimes when I'm going watching other sleds go down the track, I don't even realize how fast we're going.
BLOCK: This is skeleton racer and Olympic bronze medalist Matt Antoine.
ANTOINE: I think maybe you have to have a little bit of fear because you always have to be on your toes in this sport. When you're moving 80, 90 miles an hour, you can't get lazy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SLED ROLLING)
BLOCK: After you dive onto the sled, you have to mold your body into it and relax. Staying as still as you can, going 90 miles an hour, you steer with small movements of your shoulders and knees. Your feet hang off the back, your head and neck off the front. Your chin is just an inch or two off the ice.
ANTOINE: Obviously, you don't want your face scraping across the ice because it does slow you down, but it also doesn't feel good.
BLOCK: You keep your head aerodynamically low so you can only see a few feet in front of you. But you've memorized the course ahead of time, visualized the curves and planned your lines.
UHLAENDER: For me, I feel the ice move under my chest, so that's how I can feel the pressures and know how to direct my sled.
BLOCK: Again, Katie Uhlaender.
UHLAENDER: And I almost visualize myself from a bird's eye point of view of where I want to end up and I somehow end up there. It's like the force.
BLOCK: As another skeleton athlete tells me, we get to go 90 miles an hour headfirst - that never gets old.
Melissa Block, NPR News.