#ICYMI - Bobsledding, with Olympic Gold Medalists Curt Tomasevicz & Steve Mesler

Get ready for a wild ride – Hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore the dangerous, daring world of bobsledding: the physics, the strategy, and the skill. Featuring Olympic gold medalists Curtis Tomasevicz, Steve Mesler, and astrophysicist Charles Liu. Credit: Stockbyte. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/bobsledding-with-olympic-gold-medalists-curt-tomasevicz-and-steve-mesler/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  This is Playing With Science. Yes, you can call it bobsleigh, or you can call it bobsled. It's entirely up to you. It's loud, it's cold, it's cold in here as well, and it's a ferocious need for speed and a blind faith in one man, or woman, to steer you on a course that's ultimately true.

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because if you don't, there's an unforgiving wall of ice with your name on it. So with that in mind, you don't have to be crazy, but it may not hurt if you are.

• 0:39Gary O'Reilly?

  And being propelled at 90 miles an hour and experiencing up to 5G is not for everyone. But one man who knows what it's like to be shaken and not stirred.

• 0:50Chuck Nice?

  I see what you're saying.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Did? You like that?

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 0:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Good. Right. That man will be 2010 Olympic champion Kurt Tomasevich. And because one is never enough, we'll have Kurt's world champion teammate Steve Mesler on the show as well. Not one, but two for the price of one.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  Two Olympic gold medal winners. And as we have learned, nothing gets done without science. And so here via Skype to bring it all to life is our good buddy astrophysicist Charles Lu.

• 1:21Charles Liu?

  Yes. Hi Chuck, hi Gary, good to see you.

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  What's up?

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Likewise, are you a big bobsled fan, Charles?

• 1:27Charles Liu?

  I love it.

• 1:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 1:29Charles Liu?

  If you asked me which Olympic sport I would have wanted to do when I was a child, the answer would have been bobsleigh.

• 1:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know, I don't think you'd be alone in that. I kind of feel that way too. Well, winter sport, I would like to do bobsled, you know, because it's fast and you're like driving and it's like, it's everything a kid loves, you know what I mean? And it's sledding. Who doesn't love sledding?

• 1:48Charles Liu?

  That's exactly right.

• 1:50Gary O'Reilly?

  That's nice when it's snow and you know, there's some, you know, but not on the ice at ninety miles an hour with five G.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  It might be a little different, might be a little different to be on ice at ninety miles an hour and doing five Gs, you know.

• 2:02Charles Liu?

  Five Gs, right. You know, the Gs makes your typical adult head feel like it's a hundred and twenty pounds.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Wait, say that again. Five Gs makes your head feel like it's a hundred and twenty pounds?

• 2:15Charles Liu?

  That's right. So if you're caught in a five G turn.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:19Charles Liu?

  Try to move your head, it's unlikely that your neck muscles will be able to do that. So you're pinned. You have to really rely on the whole rest of your body in order to be where you want to go because you can't lift your head to see where you're going.

• 2:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Bob sled has just become a spectator sport for me.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man. Yeah, forget that. That's crazy. So that means when those guys are going into those turns, like whatever position they go into the turn, they need to know that because they're gonna be like pinned down in that position.

• 2:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  The whole way through the turn.

• 2:47Charles Liu?

  That is absolutely correct. That's right. And the whole motion of it is amazing. I I know that not all of us have gone ninety miles an hour down a highway before, but when you're at ninety miles an hour and you're inside a little thing, just a few feet long and a few feet across, and you've got ice all around you left and right, you better know that you're traveling in the path you want to be. Otherwise, your force, your momentum, your kinetic energy is gonna go flying somewhere you don't want it to go.

• 3:14Gary O'Reilly?

  That is blind faith in your pilot.

• 3:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 3:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely. So so Charles, okay, so from the gate and the push and, you know, if we got on a four man bob, they all sort of feather in behind each other. What forces, what is going on? What are they actually scientifically experiencing on this run?

• 3:33Charles Liu?

  The key to winning a bob sled race is obviously your velocity, right? How fast you're going and which direction you're going all the way down the track. The one constant in the whole process is the gravitational acceleration of the earth. No matter how much you weigh, no matter where you are, you're going to feel a downward acceleration of nine point eight meters per second square.

• 3:58Gary O'Reilly?

  That's fixed, you can't change that, that's fixed.

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  So, okay, and that's, that's basically like falling, right? Isn't that, that's the rate at which anything falls no matter where, right?

• 4:08Charles Liu?

  That's right. And so you have your track, which moderates that acceleration. You have the friction on the blades of the bob sled, which moderates your acceleration. And you have whatever momentum you had, the mass times the velocity of the sled and its occupants to start with, when they get in and then they go, right? You have the viscous drag of the air that prevents you from, that will actually cause you to decelerate, like to lose acceleration, to lose momentum. Depending on what direction you're going, whether the wind is blowing in your way, or whether you have one big driver or brakeman in the background standing a little bit too

• 4:53Charles Liu?

  long before tucking in and going into that aerodynamic bullet shape that you want as you're heading down the slope.

• 4:59Gary O'Reilly?

  See Chuck, you had this theory, I remember when we did NASCAR, that we got into sledding for some reason, and you just went, you always gotta have, this is me impersonating you, buddy, you always gotta have a fat kid on the sled team.

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  That's right, you do. You need a fat kid on the sled team, or you're gonna lose. That's all there is to it. You need, you need some weight on that sucker.

• 5:17Gary O'Reilly?

  So, is it basically the heavier this sled can be, the better? Because now they've got weight limitations on individuals and team weight. So, how do we sort of factor in the power to weight ratio for this thing to be so, so rapid?

• 5:36Charles Liu?

  That's a great question. It's basically a balance, right? Between the friction that will increase if your sled and its occupants weigh more than somebody else's. Balanced with whether or not you can get more momentum, which is mass times velocity, on the push, right? So if you've got four people pushing, you have the brakeman, the driver, and the pushers, right? I think that's what they're called, right?

• 6:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 6:06Charles Liu?

  And you have these four people going, if they can generate more force in that short period of time that they're pushing, then they will start off on the free slide part, the driven part of the bobsled run, with a greater velocity. So that's where you get the advantage of the mass. But since you are massive, you press down on the track more, and so if you press down on the track more, then the friction that you have with the track will increase, because that's the normal force multiplied by the coefficient of friction of the track.

• 6:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Charles, because we love to reinvent things, NASCAR and football and everything else, how about we don't increase the weight, but we increase the mass by getting, what's an aerodynamic shape of the sled and create a downforce like they do with motorsport?

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:59Gary O'Reilly?

  With the wheel arches, I mean, not that there's wheel arches on.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  Or even Formula One, where they actually create like a reverse plane.

• 7:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Can we do that? Can we create a downforce on the sled and create something like that without increasing the weight?

• 7:13Charles Liu?

  Wow, that's an interesting question. If you try to make it so that as the air moves around and above and below the bobsled, that you're actually creating a downward, an upward draft, is that what you're saying?

• 7:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, so as we compete.

• 7:30Chuck Nice?

  So you're pressing the thing, like a Formula One race car?

• 7:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Charles Liu?

  Well, the Formula One race car has a slightly different desire, I think. You'd want to reduce, you want to increase the amount of friction, because your tires are spinning, right?

• 7:49Charles Liu?

  A bobsled is a little bit different, at least from my physics perspective, because you're you're not spinning wheels underneath it.

• 7:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh huh.

• 7:57Charles Liu?

  Tracks, uh, you're you're on the

• 8:00Gary O'Reilly?

  On the runners, yeah.

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  On the runners, the blades.

• 8:02Charles Liu?

  And so those blades and those runners are sliding friction as opposed to some sort of rolling friction.

• 8:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 8:09Charles Liu?

  And you have a different kind of dynamic. You may want to do it differently.

• 8:12Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I just wondered, would it would it be a benefit to to have that sort of downforce? But because you've explained it's runners, not wheels, it's not really the way forward.

• 8:21Chuck Nice?

  So with that in mind, if you had a track that was infinite and always going downhill, would the sled continue to accelerate all the way through?

• 8:31Charles Liu?

  All the way down to the bottom. That's right.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my god.

• 8:34Charles Liu?

  Yes, now, this is this is getting into whether or not there's air.

• 8:40Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 8:41Charles Liu?

  If you have friction and if you have air resistance, what we call viscous drag, you reach eventually something called terminal velocity.

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:49Charles Liu?

  This happens when parachuters, for example, fall. Right. From a high altitude and they fall for a long period of time. And if they spread themselves out, as opposed to make themselves real small, they eventually the the drag of the atmosphere into their face will cause them to max out at some certain velocity. Okay, so the the correct answer for what you just asked, Chuck, is that if there is no other sources of, say, friction or viscosity that would otherwise slow you down, yes, you would accelerate indefinitely.

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  So that you can reach a terminal velocity, which will be your top speed, but because of the atmospheric conditions or the viscosity that you're talking about, or even the the ice itself, you're that's it, you're not going to go any faster. With that in mind, when you go into a curve or, you know, one of these banked turns, does that slow you down? Or do you remain the same? Or or can you speed up?

• 9:50Charles Liu?

  Great question. If you are going into a banked turn, you almost always slow down.

• 9:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 9:56Charles Liu?

  Now, that's in part because your friction necessarily increases when you slide upward. In other words, you have yet additional contact with the surface, right? But also because it's banked, what happens is that the amount of force aimed down the track is reduced. Your vectors are sort of split ever so slightly. So you can move faster if you had no friction because you can still feel some portion of that gravitational acceleration, but that gravitational acceleration vector is reduced. Does that make sense? So you can still speed up, but you might speed up at a slightly slower rate.

• 10:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So if I'm, if we slow down going into a curve, but if I take the higher route, am I, if I'm slowing down, but I'm gaining extra potential energy on the way out, is that correct? Would that be correct?

• 10:47Charles Liu?

  Yes, you gain extra energy on the way up, but then you, you, that becomes potential energy. But when you gain that potential energy, you lose a corresponding amount of kinetic energy. So when you come back down, you're basically the same as when you started. You don't gain anything.

• 11:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Swings and roundabouts.

• 11:04Charles Liu?

  Yes, pretty much.

• 11:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Would the skiers' altitude and wind resistance come into factor? Would it be the same for a bobsled at, if it was a high enough altitude in terms of the wind resistance that they experience because the banking is kind of enclosed? Or does that become negligible?

• 11:25Charles Liu?

  That's actually one of the questions that I hope we get a chance to ask our gold medalists, because I've always wondered myself, because bobsleds are small in their profile compared to skiers, right? And because, as you said, most bobsled venues are mostly enclosed, right? Not quite as outdoors, exposed to the elements as a downhill skier, for example. I would love to know if a crosswind or some snow or being at 12,000 feet instead of 5,000 feet makes a difference in bobsled run times. My guess is it does, but not nearly as much as you would see from a skier, right? But then again, remember that if you're going at 90 miles an hour, one one hundredth of a second is more than a foot and a half.

• 12:09Charles Liu?

  So that's more than enough time for you to...

• 12:11Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, that's, that's as good as a mile for in a bobsled event, you know, in terms of that could be first to fifth. It could be the difference. And it's that, I mean, you talked about it before about how upsetting it can be to lose by such a fraction of a second.

• 12:26Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Gary O'Reilly?

  But this is what these guys are dealing with.

• 12:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's gotta be frustrating, you know, quite frankly.

• 12:31Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd have said something else, but I'll go with frustrating.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. Let me tell you something. I lose by any one hundredth of anything, I wanna punch you in the face.

• 12:38Charles Liu?

  Yeah, kidding. For us, I mean, our regular lives, one one hundredth, what does it matter, right? But in this case, it's like, you know, 18 inches. That's plenty to cause you the difference between a gold medal and missing out completely on the podium.

• 12:52Chuck Nice?

  So cool. So listen, can we, can we keep Chuck? Let's, Chuck, can you stick around? Let's, let's take a quick break.

• 12:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, let's do that.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  Speaking of gold medals, let's, let's take a quick break, right? And we're gonna bring on a gold medalist.

• 13:04Gary O'Reilly?

  If we can, means we keep Charles Lu, then I am all for it. Right. Let's take this commercial break. The good Charles Lu will be with us when we get back. But in case you wondered, could that question be answered? It's quite simple. We're gonna have an Olympic gold Medalists, a former gold Medalists on the show, Kurt Tomasevicz. If I've mispronounced his name, my apologies. He, part of Team USA's gold-winning Olympic four-man bobsled.

• 13:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 13:43Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 13:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, he is. And this is Playing with Science, and we are still looking at the wonderful winter sport of bobsled. We have decided it's bobsled. We're dispensing with sleigh. It's a sled.

• 13:55Chuck Nice?

  No, we gotta ask our next guest. We gotta ask Curtis, weigh in on this. Yes, we gotta ask everybody cuz uh.

• 14:00Gary O'Reilly?

  What you mean the golden medal.

• 14:02Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 14:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Winner.

• 14:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I know I'm talking about gold medalists.

• 14:05Gary O'Reilly?

  The guy who's got a bronze medal as well, the guy who's not one, two, but three.

• 14:08Chuck Nice?

  Three world championships, yeah.

• 14:09Gary O'Reilly?

  That guy, is he with us?

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  That's where he's come, yeah, right. As a matter of fact, he's here right now.

• 14:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Is he?

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Curtis Thomas Evans is with us. Curtis, what's happening? Hi.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  I'm doing good, guys. How are you guys?

• 14:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't that great?

• 14:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so now let us ask you this. Bob sled, Bob sleigh, what is it?

• 14:26Speaker 03

  In typical American fashion, I think it's uh, it's bob sled in the US and everywhere else, they make it a little bit different and call it bob sleigh, so.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay, cool.

• 14:34Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I have in sleigh.

• 14:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 14:36Gary O'Reilly?

  No, I want sled.

• 14:37Chuck Nice?

  You want, yeah, gotta go with sled. He's from England and he said sled, so I think we've settled this, you know?

• 14:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Like, we'd know anything about bob sledding, but there you go. I'm just, I like the idea of sled. Always sounds if it's going somewhere.

• 14:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's very cool.

• 14:50Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so, um, you're an athlete that came out of college football and straight into bob sledding. Ow, difficult, easy transition to make from a team sport into another team sport, or did you find it very, very strange?

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Bob sled's a unique sport where you don't really have to train your entire life to become a bob sledder. Um, you know, most Olympic sports, you have to grow up and have decades of experience in order to get to that point. Uh, but I think all the football training and other sports that I played growing up, that all led to uh, to bob sled training. Um, powerful athletes, squats, cleans, sprints, those, those are the, kind of the catalyst of what we have to do. And so without knowing it, I was training for bob sled my entire career.

• 15:36Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 15:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Interesting. Now, since your career as a bob sledder, you are now on the US Olympic selection committee?

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Correct, yeah.

• 15:47Chuck Nice?

  What does that, what's that mean?

• 15:49Gary O'Reilly?

  He gets to choose who goes.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  I have a say, I guess. It's up to a committee to select the bobsled team. You know, unfortunately, it's not a sport where, you know, we have a one day trial. We have to qualify over a series of competitions. And our team isn't necessarily just your individual fastest, best pushers. We have to have a good combination of guys and girls to be on our teams.

• 16:13Gary O'Reilly?

  What's the perfect bobsledder then?

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Uh, it depends on the team. So sometimes, you know, we want to be close to a weight maximum. So we need heavy athletes. Sometimes we want athletes to fit together. Sometimes they need to just plain work well together. Um, a lot of, uh, some other subjective factors get played into, um, you know, strength and speed and, uh, power as well.

• 16:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So with us, we have Dr. Charles Liu still. Astrophysicist, extraordinary. And Charles, you had a question and I don't believe there's anyone more qualified to answer that question. So please.

• 16:45Charles Liu?

  Sure. And Curtis, let me say again, congratulations on this wonderful career that you've had. And thank you for representing and being so successful.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 16:55Charles Liu?

  Sure. So here's my question. Uh, how much does the weather actually affect a bobsled competition? We know that, for example, downhill skiers, they're very strongly affected by things like crosswinds, by snow or by temperatures that can change the coefficient of friction of the slopes. But what about bobsled, which is somewhat enclosed? And you have such a small profile against the atmosphere and the wind compared to a skier, say. Uh, how much does weather affect your runs?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Um, I would say weather in general, just as big of an effect. Um, wind, maybe not as much because as you did say, we are in a somewhat enclosed area sometimes. Um, but the temperature and humidity and things like that play a huge effect on the ice. Um, it's not just. Ice is ice. It's not just cold water, uh, you know, is all the same, right? Um, so, you know, the different, uh, minerals within the water react differently to different temperatures. So we can have really cold, hard ice, or we can have soft, warm ice. All of that plays a factor. Um, snowing, of course, um, you know, the order that we go down in a competition is really important. You know, sometimes you want to be first because you get the fresh ice.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Uh, sometimes you don't want to be first because then you're the snowplow kind of clearing out the path for everybody. So there's a, it's a game that you have to play within the game.

• 18:16Chuck Nice?

  Hey, let me ask you this, uh, since you just said, uh, different types of ice and the minerals, right? Um, who constructs the track? And how do they determine what the track is going to be, the number of turns? And, uh, are there any, um, are there any restrictions that they'll place on that? Or can you, can they just go like, this year, we're going crazy. Loop-de-loop, like, what do they do?

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Uh, that's a loaded question, I guess, but it's one of my favorite areas of the sport is talking about the physics and the engineering, um, with my background and education.

• 18:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Uh, along those things. And, uh, you know, when they build a bobsled track, uh, well, first of all, there's not a whole, a big market for, for building bobsled tracks.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  But when they build the track, you know, they're kind of estimating how fast we can go and the G-forces and all the pressures. And it's difficult because once you build the track, it's very difficult to change it. And, uh, you really don't know how fast you're going to go for sure until you build it. And so, uh, you know, it's a, it's a tough thing to predict. Um, there's a, I would say, uh, just a couple of groups of people or engineering programs, I guess, that have actually, uh, built the tracks in the recent Olympics, I guess. And so, um, you know, they're kind of consistent with the number of turns that they have, the length of the course. But all of that is also kind of given to them by the terrain that they have to follow as well.

• 19:37Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. That's pretty wild.

• 19:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Just following on from Charles' question, does altitude have any effect in terms of the thinner the air is and then the air resistance? Because you're enclosed, is it negligible? Is it not really something you're concerned about?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  I would say as far as the altitude with air resistance and for aerodynamics, probably a pretty tiny bit. I don't think that's something we're really concerned about. And especially because everybody's competing on the same track at the same time. So that part maybe not so much, but it probably does play a factor in the ice conditions a little bit. And for that reason, you know, we have to determine which runners that we put on the sled work best on different ice conditions. And so, you know, usually temperature and hardness of the ice is the number one thing that we think about. But again, those other factors, like I said, snow in the track, if there's a chance of rain, all of that, you know, determines whether we want to use a fat runner or a skinny runner. Well, that's

• 20:38Speaker 03

  flat, you know, with less control, but might go faster on the surface. So in a sense, the air pressure, air temperature as well might play a role there.

• 20:47Gary O'Reilly?

  So when do you get to know these sort of parameters on the track? Is it the day before? An hour? I mean, because you've got to rig this sled to do exactly what you've just described. So how long do you get to know in terms of course design and all the other? For instance, the composition of the ice, the minerals therein, do you get to have this information?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  A lot of times we get a one-week preparation before our races on the weekend, and that's throughout the World Cup season. At the Olympics, we usually get, I think, up to about 40 practice runs on the track, and that's spread out over about a year and a half, too. So there's not a lot of practice time in order to get familiar with the track. And most of that time is spent on the driver really nailing down the profiles and finding the fastest line to drive through the track, too. So when you're dialing in the specific ice conditions and the physics of the course itself, you know, there's not a lot of time we can spend on that.

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  You know, when we're watching on television, you know, it just looks like these guys are shooting down this tube at incredible speeds, right?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:54Chuck Nice?

  You see at the bottom of the hill that they're separated by hundreds of a second that can win or lose a race. What are the things that we are not seeing? The little tiny errors, the little tiny nuances that we're not seeing that causes the difference between those times?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it's a great question, I guess, and I'd love to, you know, be able to really dive into all the details during our races and really explain all the physics behind our races. You know, we like to break our sport down into three areas, the push, the driving, and the equipment. And all of that is really important. So, of course, when we accelerate the sled at the beginning, and, you know, we're going from zero, a velocity of zero, to get as fast as we can, but not just the high velocity, but we want to be accelerating the sled as we're getting in as well. So that's the first step into, you know, to seeing how fast we can get going all the way down the hill, because if you have high acceleration, when you get in the sled, it's

• 22:53Speaker 03

  just going to amplify your, the difference between sleds as you go down as well. But once we're in the sled, the push athletes, 99% of their job is over, the rest is up to the pilot. And when the driver's going down, he's kind of a duck on water, where he's doing a lot of driving underneath the cowling that we can't see, you know, when you're watching on television. And the way he's steering the sled are very subtle movements, and he's driving most of the, he or she, driving mostly by feel, because, you know, in a car, you can, as you're going down the road, you know, you can turn your wheels and the car will turn. Now, bobsled, you can turn your runners, and you may just keep going straight because you're on ice.

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  So you have to wait until you feel pressure, and so the sled can kind of dig into the ice, and that will give you a little more traction when you're steering. So those little, small steers, when the sled can use those steers, will, you know, put the sled on the fastest line going down the hill.

• 23:52Chuck Nice?

  So the ice tells you when you can work with it?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  A little bit, yeah. You can't really do much steering when you're going straight.

• 23:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Um, it's not going to have a huge effect, a little bit, but not much.

• 24:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Have you been able to, with modern technology and wind tunnels and all the computer models, to just find extra percentiles of advantage to your time?

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  Through design?

• 24:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Um, in the summertime, we've used wind tunnels where we sit down and we use some NASCAR technology to help us in that way, um, again with.

• 24:23Gary O'Reilly?

  You only turn left?

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Sorry, couldn't resist that.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Um, you know, we've also now been able to simulate, you know, computer models of a sled with athletes in there. So we don't have to sit in the sled anymore. Again, software can, um, you kind of simulate that same type of shape and that sort of thing too. But, you know, you can never completely rule out human variability. So, you know, an athlete has to be comfortable in the sled so that they can push the next day and they're not sore and beat up, you know.

• 24:53Gary O'Reilly?

  How about the height of an athlete? Because even though you're, once you go in, you're in this crouched position. But if you've got a really tall pusher, it's going to stick out rather badly and ruin your aerodynamics. So.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. We want to be heavy but small. So call us dense, I guess, but.

• 25:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Chuck Nice?

  You need a bunch of short, fat dudes.

• 25:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, here we go again.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Short, muscular dudes, Chuck.

• 25:20Chuck Nice?

  Short, muscular, yeah, that's right.

• 25:21Gary O'Reilly?

  If we sort of temporarily skip past the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, where is bobsledding in 10, maybe 20 years' time? Where do you see this sport going? Because it's absolute, it is a minute-long thrill and you know that better than I do for sure.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, honestly, I think, uh, you know, we talk about the NFL possibly, you know, having to go through some changes with the safety of athletes and that sort of thing. A bobsled ride is a very violent ride and I think. You know, looking forward, we may be next in having to take precautions and having to protect athletes, you know, because when we crash, which happens, you know, relatively common,

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  There's a hard hit as well. So

• 26:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Everybody wants a more fast, you know, exciting sport, you know, where crashes do happen and that sort of thing. But, you know, if we're really looking out for athlete's safety, you know, sometimes it's going to be tough to, you know, to really think of that as the best avenue for the sport. If we're talking about safety, I think we may have to take some strides in protecting athletes that way.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  So Chuck Liu, is there an engineering method to make what we're looking at now as the sled and the drive, the riders, is there, is there anything that can be done to make it safer? Like they have skiers who actually have airbags, like their body becomes an airbag. Are there methods that can, that can be integrated?

• 26:47Charles Liu?

  You can make anything safer, but there's always a cost somewhere, right? In weights or in aerodynamics or something like that that will make the ride slower. I mean, I'm sure Curtis has excellent examples of that sort of thing. But for example, a crumple zone in a car, right, is something that it can cushion a blow. Or you can imagine a helmet that has a little bit more shock absorbing capability so that one person hits the wall with it, with your head, it's not quite as violent in the reaction that gets hit in the skull. But in the end, it's got to be trade offs. And so there are many, many things that can be done, but what's the best thing that should be done for a driver or for that

• 27:32Charles Liu?

  matter, anybody in the back as well. And we've, Curtis, you know, we see horrific crashes sometimes and they're sadly often played on highlight wheels, right, in between Olympic segments and so forth. Do you, can you recall like a particularly scary crash for you that where you thought, gee, if I had this particular safety technology, I would have felt much better going into that crash or having experienced that particular crash?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Uh, that's interesting question.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Possibly, I guess I could say that one of the worst crashes I was in was on a track that was in, that was built in Germany. And the track is kind of old when sleds were going much slower speeds. And now that we're going faster, I think the track itself is a little bit dangerous. And so, you know, I think, you know, if you talk about the engineering from a track standpoint, maybe we can, you know, it's not exciting, but maybe we keep sleds a little bit slower and make, you know, the, the sport again safer in that way. If you're talking about equipment or technology.

• 28:35Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  You know, I think helmets as well. I think that's an area where, you know, you can definitely talk about, we want as light a helmet as possible because we're sprinting with it on. So we, we don't want to be uncomfortable that way. But, you know, I think it's, you know, making a small, light helmet isn't always the safest helmet. So as, you know, materials develop and, you know, we talk about, you know, carbon fiber and, you know, really strong but light material, I think that'll help quite a bit too.

• 29:02Charles Liu?

  Yeah. So I remember, for example, the Lake Placid track has a turn called Shady, which is extremely sharp. And I imagine that if you're going nowadays 90 miles an hour instead of the past when you're going 50 or 60, and you take the wrong line, you could go flying in a very, very dangerous way, just on that one curve. And I don't want to single out that just one curve, but I'm sure there are many others around the world with that same sort of problem.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think every track probably has a, an infamous curve where most crashes happen and, you know, it is pretty scary. Honestly, we always talk about the moment of silence. Right before we crash, we are airborne just a little bit, you know? And so that's a, is a pretty eerie, uncomfortable feeling where you know it's coming, but it's so fast, you don't have time to react. It's just a kind of a thing you think about in hindsight. But, um, yeah, each track, you know, does have those certain areas that, again, it's, it's for excitement. It's, you don't want an easy sport either, so.

• 29:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. You know what'll happen? You'll get the safety aspect of it covered. And then they'll go, right, let's make the course that much more difficult.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  That's the way, that's the way you'd go for it. Listen, I'm, you know, because all I could say is, you know, spending my whole life as a, as an elite athlete, I like being challenged by dangerous situations, you know? I'm sure you'll agree, Kurt.

• 30:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Anyway, uh, we are time poor. Kurt, thank you. We wish you and your team for the upcoming Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea the very best of luck.

• 30:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man. Thanks for taking the time and joining us.

• 30:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, may they strike gold.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 30:39Gary O'Reilly?

  May they strike gold. And of course, to Dr. Charles Liu, once again, thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure. Right, we are gonna take a break, um.

• 30:46Chuck Nice?

  When we return.

• 30:47Gary O'Reilly?

  From one gold Medalists to another.

• 30:49Chuck Nice?

  Hey, that's right. Hey Kurt, we got, uh, we got your buddy coming on right now.

• 30:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Shame we couldn't get the band back together.

• 30:55Chuck Nice?

  That's right, we got Steve Mesler coming on.

• 30:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah. Stick around, there can be plenty of fun. More gold-winning bobsledders coming up. We'll be with you shortly.

• 31:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back, I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I'm Chuck Nice. This is Playing with Science, and today, yes, you know, because you've been tuned in for the whole of the show, it's bobsled.

• 31:18Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 31:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 31:19Chuck Nice?

  Or bobsleigh, or bobsled, or bobsleigh.

• 31:23Gary O'Reilly?

  It's an easy-race situation. You don't win, you don't lose. Um.

• 31:27Chuck Nice?

  I bet you we have somebody who knows the definitive answer with us.

• 31:30Gary O'Reilly?

  I know what I know, which is he's a former Olympic champion. That means all gold, baby. Steve Mesler, welcome to Playing with Science, sir. How are you?

• 31:41Speaker 04

  I'm great, guys. How are you guys doing today?

• 31:42Gary O'Reilly?

  We're good. So, the, the big question, the burning question, obviously, that we've just come up with, bobsleigh or bobsled?

• 31:49Speaker 04

  It depends on where you are. If you're in the US, it's bobsled. If you're in basically anywhere else that speaks English, it's gonna be bobsleigh.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God, it's soccer and football.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  We go, except for we try to keep it sneakier and just change a few hunters.

• 32:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I like sled. Sleigh's just kind of reindeer and things like that, so nah.

• 32:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, sled sounds like you are doing something. Sleigh sounds like a little trip through the snow to grandma's house.

• 32:16Gary O'Reilly?

  There's little bells.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  You're getting cold, like my, like my grandpa used to pull me on the sled.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 32:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That's got speed built on already. Now, you were part of an Olympic-winning team. Which position on the four men were you?

• 32:31Speaker 04

  I pushed on the right-hand side. I was the third guy into the sled.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:35Gary O'Reilly?

  You were also the pilot on...

• 32:38Speaker 04

  I was a pilot in and out, but I was the push athlete on the team that won the gold medal. And I was kind of a pilot in and out of my career.

• 32:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you piloted during a two man, right? Is that, is that, yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  Now that we, now that we mention that, what's the big difference between two man and four man? You know, because you see, you know, you see them and it's very hard from the, from the untrained eye to figure out, why is there a two man and why is there a four man?

• 33:08Speaker 04

  You know, I mean, the biggest difference, this is a science show, so I'm going to throw some math at you.

• 33:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yay. We won't understand it, but by all means, throw away.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Biggest difference is the four man sled has two more guys in it.

• 33:20Chuck Nice?

  Way to go.

• 33:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, hang on a minute.

• 33:22Chuck Nice?

  I don't think I can handle this. Not sure if I'm understanding. Okay, tell it to me again, like, tell me, tell me again, Steve, like I'm a four year old. Sometimes I have some problems following things.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  The biggest difference is that, I mean, a two man sled is like a Porsche. Like you can weave in and out, you can get it into trouble, you can get it out of trouble really quickly. A four man sled is like a Greyhound bus. When you're in a four man sled and you start going, you'll see a lot more crashes happening in four man bob sled than you will in two man.

• 33:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that because there's all those people arguing at the back?

• 33:51Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And there's the bigger, it's like the bumps in the back.

• 33:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  No, that's, I mean, four man is faster. Four man creates a little more havoc on the track. It's a lot heavier, which means the G-forces are, are, are cutting up the track a lot more.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  You're, so you're doing a lot more damage to the ice, which again, makes it harder to control. So four man is a lot more of a circus than a two, than the two man races. And yeah, in two man, it's kind of more like a track and field where it's kind of like mono, mono. You're one push athlete, one driver as opposed to a bigger, a bigger.

• 34:26Gary O'Reilly?

  See, as a pilot, you're the only guy that actually gets to do the whole thing with their eyes open.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Clear. Exactly.

• 34:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. And now, you, you just kind of drive by wire, so you, you're steering in, in the sort of handle thing, you don't have a wheel or anything like that, it's?

• 34:43Speaker 04

  You've got, you've got these two D rings, they're called D rings, uh, you've got two rings that have ropes that are attached to the front axle, axle, and when you pull to the right this way, the runners will turn that way, when you pull to the left, the runners will turn that way, and that's how you're adjusting the whole time, and then you've got these bungee cords that are attached from the axle to the main part of the sled, so as you pull this way, you're pulling against the bungee cord, so as you let go, they actually, it actually snaps it back to center, so you're not having to drive it back to center each time, so you'll see, see the men and women, you know, on the top of the hill in Korea, and the, you know, the NBC cameras will be, will be focusing on them, and you'll see them going through their, you know, going through their minds and trying to drive the track that way, and they're only having to drive this, and then they're just letting

• 35:28Speaker 04

  go, you'll see them let the sled go, like that, because-

• 35:30Gary O'Reilly?

  What's the margin of error? When you're hitting one of those big curves, what's the margin of error? A foot, a yard, an inch?

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Every, every corner's different, every corner's different, um, you'll have, you'll have some corners where literally the margin of error between you crashing and not crashing is going to be six inches.

• 35:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  You'll, you'll have other corners where you could get in super late, um, you know, really deep into the curve, you can get in, you're, you're getting onto curves early and late, uh, and you're not going to crash, but you're going to have to drive the sled really hard, which is, which means just like if you think of somebody, you know, skating on ice, how do you skate on, how do you stop on ice? You, you turn your skates.

• 36:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 36:08Speaker 04

  Well, obside, and you have to turn the sled really hard, you have to turn those front runners really hard, you're doing a hockey stop with the sled.

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  So now, for, for you guys, for you guys behind the driver, um, two things, one, there's got to be some communication between the driver and the, and the other guys in the, in, in, in the sled, and two-

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Incorrect.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  Incorrect, oh wow, okay, cool, uh, what are you guys doing as this is happening?

• 36:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Praying.

• 36:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and, and, and can you, can you affect the sled negatively while it's going down through the course?

• 36:43Speaker 04

  We're tweeting, uh, posting on Instagram.

• 36:49Chuck Nice?

  Getting some selfies for Instagram?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but you gotta check and make sure, see what everybody's saying. Um, you are, when you're in the back of the sled, your job, your, your job is to move, move fluently with the sled. And you can't see anything, so you have to know the timing of every corner and every curve as they come.

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Yep, move with it, because if you think about it, if you're sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and somebody's driving a hundred miles an hour straight, and they go and they turn the wheel to the left, you're gonna, you get pushed into the door that way.

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Well, if that happens, if you don't know the turn is coming, and you're going a hundred miles an hour in a bob sled, and the sled turns, and you get pushed into the side of the sled, you're gonna throw that sled off on, off on an angle because it's on ice.

• 37:31Gary O'Reilly?

  So it's, it's not a case of like, I push it, that's my work done.

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 37:35Gary O'Reilly?

  From there on in, the important stuff happens because you've had to visualize the track, the course, the whole way from start to finish, and then be able to intuitively feel any change?

• 37:45Speaker 04

  And move, and move with. I mean, the, the important, important part of the, of the push athlete's job is to draw, is to push and accelerate that sled, because that's the only time we as people have a chance to, you know, affect the acceleration of the sled. Uh, when the driver's in there, the driver's job is to drive as little as possible, so he's, he or she is hockey skip, hockey stopping as possible, down the track, and the push athlete's role is to, yeah, is to move with it, so they're causing as little disturbance in that sled as possible.

• 38:13Gary O'Reilly?

  So when you, when you're training, do you employ sort of virtual reality training? Or is it a case of the track is what it is when we get there, or do you have an advantage from, from a buildup point of view?

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  And how much do you get to, how much do you get to practice on the track? Because this sounds, this sounds really dangerous.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Not much. No, I mean, not much. I mean, when you see the people competing in the Olympics this month in Korea, I, you know, they'll have had maybe a week or two of training last week on the track, two runs a day. They'll have a week of training on the track this past fall, and then they'll have two or three days of training before the race.

• 38:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh my god.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  And no more than two runs a day, because the G-forces that you go through is just too hard on your body, so you typically don't do much more than two a day.

• 38:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow. How do you cope with that? How do you train for the G-forces? I mean, what do you do? Go to the local space center and ask them to spin you around this big centrifugal thing?

• 39:01Speaker 04

  I know, I mean.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  It's you spend a month on ice before the season starts and you kind of remind your body what's happening and and you remind your neck and your back because that's really you're you're bent over in that sled and and that's when you've got five G's pushing you down like that your neck and your back gets pretty stiff and sore so you you just work through it um and go I mean it's not that it's actually it sounds a little scary than it is to go through those kinds of G-forces um it's more of the body just gets used to it.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  So I mean there's got to be a lot of trust between you guys.

• 39:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So in other words you get you get off the you get off the sled and you say my back hurts and you all you hear is a chorus of deal with it.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 04

  I mean that's basically what that's basically what you're getting I mean it's yeah everyone else would just say yeah me too so.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  But but what I was saying was there's got to be a lot of trust between you guys on the team as a unit because it kind of looks like there's a guy driving there's three guys riding but now that you've really explained this everybody is playing an active role the entire way down the course and if one of you messes up you could really screw up everybody and everything.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely no I mean that's I mean it's it's a team sport through and through whether it's two man or four man or two woman bobsled uh it is a or bobsleigh depends upon now you know.

• 40:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Right we're going with sled.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Where you happen to be standing and um and that's you know that's a that's a wonderful thing about the sport is everybody has roles everybody's roles kind of ebb and flow of the importance of what they're doing when they're doing it over the forty or fifty sixty seconds of the run depending upon what track you run uh and you have you have to have absolute confidence in your driver and the driver has absolute has to have absolute confidence that you know the the team is going to do their job on the low they're going to do their job on the push and give them the proper acceleration and the driver's part of that just like the the push athletes are part of you know making sure the sled is fast down the hill um along with the driver.

• 40:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So we've got the push so we've got the muscle we've got the momentum going you all jump in in sequence and someone sticks a spike where you don't need one and you're kind of like in an awkward position you can't has that happened where someone's you you've all got to fit in nicely as a little component pieces but all of a sudden you're human it goes wrong what happens then?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's hundreds of tiny little pin spikes on the bottom of those on the bottom of our bobsled spikes.

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  It's not like a track and field shoe where there's like seven, there's like hundreds of these little ones and they're like a brush on the bottom of the shoe and so your your feet kind of stick like Velcro, like the little hooks in Velcro.

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Nice and it's straight when you're on there, but yeah, to your point, you get in, you can ask my teammate Kurt Tomasevicz what happens. I got in, we got back from the track day one after our first, the first race in Vancouver, so there's two days of racing, two heats per day. The cumulative four heats and we get back to the track, get back to the Olympic Village after day one and we had a great day, we were up by I think forty three hundredths of a second, which is a lot of time in bobsled, it's, it's a whole lot of time in bobsled.

• 42:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  And, you know, the adrenaline of the day was starting to wear off, I hopped in the shower and all of a sudden I, ah, and I started yelling and I looked down and Kurt had in fact spiked me in the calf getting in earlier in the day and he hadn't done that in years actually and he could hear me yelling at him from the shower. He came back and he just kind of slumped his head and was like, sorry.

• 42:25Chuck Nice?

  Sorry, man. Sorry, dude. So when you guys, when you guys are, how do you sink when you're running and pushing off? Is this internal timing? Is there any communication between you while you're pushing off? I mean, how exactly do you time that out so that, you know, everybody's in the sled exactly when they're supposed to be?

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, it's a good question. Practice, just like anything else, I mean, hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of thousands of reps in the ice house, which is a training facility or on the hill or on dry land or in the garage, but you'll hear the teams, when you're watching bobsled at the Olympics, you'll hear them and they'll, they're communicating between the push athletes and the driver to make sure that everybody's starting at the same time because there is no red light, it's not like in racing where it's like red, red, yellow, green and it goes, everybody goes, you have 60 seconds to go and there's a clock that's counting down and you're allowed to go at any point in that 60 seconds.

• 43:23Chuck Nice?

  So what's the code? What's, what's the code between everybody?

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Every team is different.

• 43:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Our code was back set, the break, the break, we would yell back set. And then the front driver would yell front set and then the driver would yell ready and and then we'd hit the sled. So back set, front set, ready and. Wow.

• 43:41Chuck Nice?

  Bang. Wow, that's cool, man.

• 43:43Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, your, your gold winning team was called the Night Train.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  It's called the Night Train.

• 43:48Gary O'Reilly?

  There's a reason and you're going to please tell us.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Well, I, you know, and the name actually came up because the sled, when we first got the sled, it was fast. It was fall of two thousand eight, a couple of years before the Olympics and the sled was super fast. We were in training in like in Park City and when they, when the sled engineers send us the, the new sled, they just send it with a primer coat on because the hard coats are expensive and if they have to do any adjustments, you just don't want to bother putting on that nice glossy coat. So they just had this like matte black primer coat on it.

• 44:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  And it's like, all right, we want this sled. It's going to come to Europe with us next week. And the engineer was like, well, hold on, we need to get it back to Connecticut, which is where all the Bodine sleds were. We need to get the hard coat on it, do some things. And we were like, no, no, we don't need a hard coat. Just send it to Europe. We're going to race in this thing. And he said, okay, but he, you know, he wanted to have something on it because it looked really plain. And Harley Davidson had a motorcycle that was matte black, back, way back in the day and it was called the Night Train. And our sled engineer, Bob Cunio, just thought that was a really cool idea. And the sled showed up a week later in Lake Placid before we were going to ship these out to Europe. And it had this sticker on it and it had this Night Train logo on it. It said the Night Train. So it was Bob Cunio gets all the credit.

• 45:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Fair enough.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  Hey, I'm more American if you called it the Screamin' Eagle Mom Train. So that's awesome.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  It would fit.

• 45:09Gary O'Reilly?

  It would have fit.

• 45:10Speaker 04

  If it was a six man sled, that would have fit.

• 45:14Gary O'Reilly?

  How do, how, how do you look at it and say, this sled's fast? I mean, apart from the fact it's got an engine on it and wings, but so how, how do you design something that's faster? Because it just, they all look the same. I know I'm being daft with this, but surely there's a reason why it was faster.

• 45:31Speaker 04

  Question. It's a good, I mean, we spent a lot of time in the wind tunnel. We spent a lot of time in digitization.

• 45:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  Uh, and we, we work on, we work on the math, we work on the, the aerodynamics. Uh, and then, and then, you know, lastly, we get on this, we get on the track with it and we'll use our old sled and our new sled and we'll, we'll test back and forth, back and forth and forth. And you're you're testing against you on a track like Park City, which Steve Holcomb, our driver who recently passed away this year.

• 45:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's very sad. I'm sorry.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you. It was he was born and raised in Park City. He knew that track like the back of his hand. He could drive it the same way every single time. So we would use the same set of runners, the blades, the metal blades and the bottom of the sled. And we would just trade the sled back and forth um and do everything else the same. And and it was the sled was amazingly faster than the old one.

• 46:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So but we we're running out of time here, but I we've been remiss to let you go without talking about Classroom Champions and how Bob sledding led you to Classroom Champions and to where you are right now.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  You know, I I used to go into schools and give a talk just like any athlete or any other successful business person or anyone else. I used to go into a school, I'd give a talk, um and then I'd leave and I'd never see those kids again. And I'd always say, if one or two kids listened, it was worth my time.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  And we just thought, you know, my sister is getting her PhD in education. I was living this life that the 10 year old kid in us would have just thought was amazing. And we we wanted to do something that would make a difference. And Classroom Champions has turned into over 100, over 100 Olympians, Paralympians, college student athletes, NFL players, mentoring via technology, via via Skype, via AICD videos, video and social media, more than 25,000 kids. And what's really cool for your audience is we're partnered with NBC and on February 22, every single school in America is going to be able to talk to amazing athletes like Aaron Hamlin and a lot of Myers Taylor that you're going to see all over NBC and do a live chat with them. So.

• 47:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Well done you, sir. Well done the organization.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 47:29Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, this was really cool talking to you. Thanks so much. I hope um that we'll get to do it again, uh, whether it's Classroom Champions or Bob sledding or track and field or anything else that you have been involved with over your life, because it has been a lot. So we certainly look forward to having you back, man.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Thank you, guys. I love everything you're doing and keep up the great work. Enjoy the Olympics.

• 47:49Gary O'Reilly?

  You too. Thank you. Steve Mesler there.

• 47:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 47:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Former Olympic gold medal winner.

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Man, it must feel good to have.

• 47:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Winner, by the way.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  It's gotta feel good, right?

• 47:58Gary O'Reilly?

  You know what I mean?

• 47:58Chuck Nice?

  I wish I if I had been if I had won a gold medal for anything, like even if it was filled with chocolate.

• 48:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. I know what you're gonna do.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, be like Chuck Nice Gold Medal Chocolate Winner. Yeah, Gold Fidget Spinner. I don't care what it is you give me.

• 48:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Give me the gold.

• 48:15Chuck Nice?

  Give me the gold.

• 48:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh man. Oh wow. Um, yeah, well, I hope you've enjoyed our show. Yes, it was a good one. Yeah, bobsled? Yeah, bobsledding. Bobsled or bobsleigh? It's an either or situation. No, it's bobsled. It's bobsled. Yeah, we had, that's a done deal. Bobsled. And if there is a bobsled out there, we like you as well, sir.

• 48:34Gary O'Reilly?

  No, you didn't just do that. I did. That's awesome. Couldn't resist it. Right. Um, on that wonderful note, uh, that's it from us. Bobsled over and out. Hope you've enjoyed it. I am still Gary O'Reilly. And I'm still Chuck Nice. See you soon.