Skeleton: An Olympic Winter Sport

Skeleton is a sport where you race against the clock. The athletes will go down an icy slope on a sled on their stomach, head first. Each athlete makes four runs. Only six medals are given: 3 to women and three to men. The athlete with the quickest time of all four of their runs combined wins. Men and women compete separately so there will be a gold medal for a woman, a gold medal for a man, and so forth. If two athletes have the same time overall, they will tie and come in the same place. It is prohibited to warm a sled’s runners or anything else that may help sliding. They test the runners’ temperatures at the beginning of the race by referring to a reference runner which has been exposed for an hour before the race starts to regular, open air, the athletes runners must be within four degrees Celsius of the reference runner.

Skeleton originated in St. Moritz Switzerland. It originated from an idea in the late 1860s by Caspar Badrutt. It was given its name in 1892 when a new sled came out that was made of metal and was said to look like a skeleton. It appeared twice in the Olympics, in St. Moritz for the men in 1928 and 1948. Then, at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City Utah, it became a sport for both men and women.

Skeleton has some problems and controversies. The U.S.A coach for skeleton was in late 2005 and early 2006 suspended over sexual harassment allegation, however no evidence to support this was found and he was later reinstated as the women’s team coach. Zach Lund was for a year, banned from competition for using finasteride, this ban also included the 2006 Winter Olympics and forced him to give up a silver medal from a November World Cup. Finasteride is a drug that could be used to cover up evidence of usin...

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...liding Center is also used for bobsleigh and luge. The venue costs about $76.5mn. The length used for the competitions can be from 1384 to 1500 meters. The track has 18 curves/turns. The elevation the athlete would start at would be around 836m with a vertical drop of about 131.9m leaving the finish elevation to be around 711.5m.

This sport has to do with geography because it is a very small section in one of the two main branches of geography. The two main branches of geography are human and physical, this would be under human. Under the human branch would be many smaller branches that go into even smaller branches. This sport would be under the culture branch of the human branch because, it is part of the Olympics, and the Olympics is a cultural event where many of the world’s countries come together and they participate in multiple events/sports with each other.