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

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

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/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

I'm Gary O'Reilly and I'm Chuck Knives. 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. 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. And being propelled at 90 miles an hour and experiencing up to 5G is not not for everyone but one man who knows what it's like to be shaken and not stirred is that did you like that 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. 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 Liu. Hi, Chuck. Hi, Gary. Good to see you. Likewise. Are you a big bobsled fan, Chuck. Hi, Gary. Good to see you. Likewise. Are you a big Bob Sled fan, Charles? I love it.

If you asked me which Olympic sport I would have wanted to do when I was a child, the answer would have been Bob Sleds. 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 Bob Sleds, 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? That's exactly right.

That's nice when it's snow and, you know, but not on the ice at 90 miles an hour with 5G. It might be a little different. It might be a little different to be on the ice at 90 miles an hour and doing 5Gs, you know? 5Gs, right. You know, the 5Gs makes your typical what I mean? 5Gs, right. You know that 5Gs makes your typical adult head feel like it's 120 pounds. Wait, say that again. 5Gs makes your head feel like it's

120 pounds? That's right. So if you're caught in a 5G turn, 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. Bobsled has just become a spectator sport for me. Yeah, man. 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 going to be like pinned down in that position all whole way through the turn. That is absolutely correct.

That's right. And the whole motion of it is amazing. I know that not all of us have gone 90 miles an hour down a highway before. But when you're at 90 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 going to go flying somewhere you don't want it to go that is blind faith in your pilot yeah man 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 the key to winning a bobsled race is obviously your velocity right how fast you're going and which direction you're going all the way down the. 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 9.8 meters per second squared. Because that's fixed. You can't change that. That's fixed. That's basically falling, right? That's the rate at which And that's basically like falling, right? Isn't that?

That's the rate at which anything falls no matter where, right? That's right. And so you have your track, which moderates that acceleration. You have the friction on the blades of the sled and its occupants to start with when they get in and then they go. 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 long before tucking in and going into that aerodynamic bullet shape that you want as you're heading down the slope see chuck you had this theory i remember when we did nazcar that we got into sledding for some reason, and you just went, you always got to have,

this is me impersonating you, buddy, you always got to have a fat kid on the sled team. That's right. You too. You need a fat kid on the sled team or you're going to lose. That's all there is to it. You need some weight on that sucker. 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? 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. So if you've got four people pushing, you have the brakeman, the driver, and the two pushers. I think that's what they're called, right?

Yes. 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 than 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. 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 an aerodynamic shape of the sled and create a downforce like they do with motorsport?

Oh, yeah. With the wheel arches? I mean, not that there's wheel arches on. Or even Formula One, where they actually create a reverse plane. Can we do that? Can we create a downforce on the sled and create something like that without increasing the weight? 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 an upward draft. Is that what you're saying?

So you're pressing the thing like a Formula One race car. Yeah. 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. A bobsled is a little bit different, at least from my physics perspective, because you're not spinning wheels underneath it. You're tracks. You're on the runners. The blades. And so those blades and those

runners are sliding friction as opposed to some sort of rolling friction. Okay. And you have a different kind of dynamic. You may want to do it differently. No, I just wondered, would it be a benefit to have that sort of downforce? But because you've explained it, it's runners, not wheels, it's not really the way forward. not really the way forward. 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?

All the way down to the bottom, that's right. Oh my god. Yes, now this is getting into whether or not there's air. If you have friction and if you have air resistance, what we call viscous drag, you reach eventually something called terminal velocity. This happens when parachuters, for example, fall 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, eventually the drag of the atmosphere into

their face will cause them to max out at some certain velocity. So 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. So 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 ice itself, that's it. You're not going to go any faster. With that in mind, when you go into a curve or one of these banked turns,

does that slow you down or does you remain the same or, or can you speed up? Great question. If you are going into a banked turn, you almost always slow down. 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. So if we slow down going

into a curve, but if I take the higher route, if I'm slowing down, but I'm gaining extra potential energy on the way out, is that correct? Would that be correct? Yes'm gaining extra potential energy on the way out. Is that correct? Would that be correct? Yes, you gain extra energy on the way up, but then 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 mean anything. Swims and roundabouts.

Yes, pretty much. With the skiers, altitude and wind resistance come into factor. Would it be the same for a bobsled 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? 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 runtimes. 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 in 90 miles an hour, one one-hundredth of a second is more than a foot and a half. So that's more than enough time for you to – I mean, that's as good as a mile in a bobsled event, in terms of that could be first to fifth.

That 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. Yeah. But this is what these guys are dealing with. Yeah. It's got to be frustrating, you know, quite frankly. I'd have said something else, but I'll go with frustrating.

Yeah. Yeah. Let me tell you something. I lose by any one hundredth of anything. I want to punch you in the face. Yeah. For us, I mean, our regular lives, one hundredth is a guy. What does it matter?

Right. But in this case, it's like 18 inches. That's plenty to cause you the difference between a gold medal and missing out completely on the podium. So cool. So listen, can we keep Chuck? Chuck, can you stick around? Let's take a quick break.

Yeah, let's do that. Speaking of gold medals, let's take a quick break, right? And we're going to bring on a gold medalist. If it means we keep Charles Liu, then I am all for it. Right. Let's take this commercial break. The good Charles Liu will be with us when we get back. But in case you wondered, could that question be answered?

It's quite simple. We're going to have an Olympic gold medalist, a former gold medalist on the show, Kurt Tomasevich. If I've mispronounced his name, my apologies. He, part of Team USA's gold winning Olympic four-man bobsleigh. Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I'm Chuck Nice. Yes, he is. And this is Playing Weird 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.

No, we've got to ask our next guest. We've got to ask Curtis, weighing on this. We've got to ask everybody. What, you mean the gold medal winner from Vancouver? Yeah, I'm talking about gold medalist who's got a bronze medal as well the guy who's not one two but three world championships yeah that guy's that's where he's coming yeah right as a matter of fact he's here right now that's right curtis tomasevich is with us curtis what's happening hi i'm doing good guys how are you guys isn't that great yeah so now let us ask you this. Bob Sled, Bob Slay.

What is it? In typical American fashion, I think it's Bob Sled in the U.S. and everywhere else they make it a little bit different and call it Bob Slay. Okay, cool. No, I'm having Slay. Yeah, there you go. No, I want Sled. Yeah, got to go with Sled.

He's from England and he says Sled, so I think we've settled this. We'd know anything about Bob Sledding, but there you go. I'm just, I like the idea of sled. Always sounds like it's going somewhere. Yeah, it's very cool. All right. So you're an athlete that came out of college football and straight into bobsledding. Ow.

Difficult. Easy transition to make from a team sport into another team sport, or did you find it very very strange bobsled is a unique sport where you don't really have to train your entire life to become a bobsledder um you know most olympic sports you have to grow up and have decades of experience in order to get to that point but i think all the football training and other sports that i played growing up that that all led to bobsled training. Powerful athletes, squats, cleans, sprints, those are the catalyst of what we have to do. And so without knowing it, I was training for bobsled my entire career.

Nice. Interesting. Now, since your career as a bobsledder, you are now on the U.S. Olympic selection committee? Correct, yeah. What does that mean? He gets to choose who goes. I have a say, I guess. It's up to a committee to select the bobsled team. Unfortunately, it's not a sport where 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 what's the perfect bobsledder then

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. A lot of some other subjective factors get played into, you know, strength and speed and power as well. OK, so with us, we have Dr. Charles Liu still. Astrophysicist extraordinaire. Charles, you had a question and I don't believe there's anyone more qualified to answer that question. So please. had a question and I don't believe there's anyone more qualified to answer that question. So please. 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. I appreciate it. Thank you. Sure. So here's my

question. 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, how much does weather affect your runs? I would say weather in general, just as big of an effect. Wind, maybe not as much because as you did say, we are in a somewhat enclosed area sometimes. But the temperature and humidity and things like that play a huge effect on the ice. It's not just ice is ice. It's not just cold water, you know,

is all the same, right? So, you know, the different 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. Snowing, of course, 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. 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. Hey, let me ask you this, since you just said the different types of ice and the minerals, who constructs the track and how do they determine what the track is going to be, the number

of turns? And are there any restrictions that they'll place on that? Or can they just go like, this year we're going crazy, loop-de-loop? Like, what do they do? 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 with my background in education. Yeah.

Along those things. And, you know, when they build the bobsled track, well, first of all, there's not a whole a big market for for building bobsled tracks. 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 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'm going to say just a couple groups of people or engineering programs i guess that have actually built the tracks in the recent Olympics, I guess. And so, 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. Gotcha. That's pretty wild. Just following on from Charles' question, does altitude have any effect in terms of the sin of the air is and then the air resistance? Because you're enclosed, is it negligible? Is it not really something you're concerned about? I would say as far as the altitude with air resistance and for aerodynamics, probably 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, um, a little bit in that. And, uh, 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. One that's 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. So in a sense, the air pressure, air temperature as well might play a role there. So when do you get to know the 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 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? 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 uh 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 uh the course itself um you know there's not a lot of time we can spend on that. When we're watching on television, it just looks like these guys are shooting down this tube at incredible speeds, right? But you see at the bottom of the hill that they're separated by

hundredths 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 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? 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 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, once you get in the sled, it's 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. 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. In a bobsled, you can turn your runners and you may just keep going straight because you're on ice. Oh, God. 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 put the sled on the fastest line going down the hill. So the ice tells you when you can work with it? A little bit, yeah. You can't really do much steering when you're going straight. It's not going to have a huge effect. A little bit, but not much. 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? Through design. Yeah. Yes, absolutely.

In the summertime, we've used wind tunnels where we sit down and we use some NASCAR technology to help us in that way. You only turn left. Yeah. Sorry, I couldn't resist that. 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 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, 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, they're going to stick out rather badly and ruin your aerodynamics. Yeah, absolutely. We want to be heavy but small.

So call us dense, I guess. Yeah. You need a bunch of short, fat dudes. Oh, here we go again. Short, heavy dudes. Short, muscular dudes. Short, muscular. Yeah, that's right. 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. Yeah, honestly, I think, you know, we talk about the nfl possibly you know having to go through some changes with uh safety of athletes and that sort of thing a bobsled ride is a very violent ride and uh i think you know looking forward um we may be next in having to take precautions and having to protect athletes um you know because when we crash which happens you know relatively common yeah you know there's a hard hit as well so yeah everybody wants a more, you know, relatively common, you know, there's a hard hit as well.

So 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 safety, you know, sometimes it's going to be tough 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. So Chuck Liu, is there an engineering method to make what we're looking at now as the sled and the drive of the riders? 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 be integrated? 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 capabilities so that when a person hits the wall 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 tradeoffs. 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 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 uh that's interesting question um 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, but maybe we keep sleds a little bit slower and make, you know, the sport, again, safer in that way. If you're talking about equipment or technology. Right.

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 uh 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 um you know carbon fiber and you know really strong but light material um i think that'll help quite a bit too. 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 pass 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. Yeah, I think every track probably has an infamous curve where most crashes happen, and it is pretty scary. Honestly, we always talk about the moment of silence. Right before we crash, we are airborne just a little bit. And so that 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 kind of a thing you think about in hindsight. But, yeah, each track, you know, does have those certain areas that, again, it's for excitement. You don't want an easy sport either. You know what will 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. Yeah, of course.

That's the way you'd go for it. Listen, because all I can say is spending my whole life as an elite athlete, I like being challenged by dangerous situations. I'm sure you'll agree, Kurt. Anyway, we are time poor. Kurt, you know. I'm sure you'll agree, Kurt. Anyway, 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. Yeah, man. Thanks for taking the time and joining us. Yeah, may they strike gold. Thank you. Yeah. May they strike gold.

And of course, to Dr. Charles Liu, once again, thank you, sir. Been a pleasure. Right, we are going to take a break. When we return. From one gold course, to Dr. Charles Liu, once again, thank you, sir. It's been a pleasure. Right. We are going to take a break. When we return. From one gold medalist to another. Hey, that's right. Hey, Kurt, we got your buddy coming on right now. Shame we couldn't get the band back together.

That's right. We got Steve Messler coming on. Oh, yeah. Stick around. There's going to be plenty of fun. More gold-winning bobsledders coming up. We'll be with you shortly. Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly. And I'm Chuck Nice. And 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. Yes. Yep. Or bobsleigh. Or bobsled. Or bobsleigh. It's an ease of roar situation.

You don't win, you don't lose um i bet you we have somebody who knows the definitive answer with us i know what i know which is he's a former olympic champion that means all gold baby steve messler welcome to playing with science sir how are you i'm great guys how are you guys doing today? We're good. So the big question, the burning question, obviously, that we've just come up with, bobsleigh or bobsled? 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 going to be bobsled. Oh, my God. It's soccer and football. Exactly. There you go, except for we try to keep it sneakier and just change a few letters. Right. I like sled.

Sleigh's just kind of reindeer and things like that. Yeah. Nah. Yeah, sled sounds like you are doing something. Yep. Sleigh sounds like a little trip through the snow to grandma town. There's little bells. You're getting pulled like my grandpa used to pull me on the sleigh.

Right. Yeah. Sled. That's got speed built on already. Now, you were part of an olympic winning team which position on the four man were you i pushed on the right hand side i was the third guy into the slate right you were also the pilot um 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 yeah you piloted during a two-man right? Is that, is that, yeah.

Yeah. I've been a two man over the years. Now that we, now that we mentioned that, what's the big difference between two man and four man? Uh, 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? You know, I mean, the biggest difference, this is a science show, so I'm going to throw some math at you. Yay! We won't understand it, but by all means, throw away. Biggest difference is the four-man sled has two more guys in it.

Way to go! Oh, hang on a minute. I don't think I can handle this. Hang on a minute. Not sure if I'm understanding. Okay, tell me again Like tell me Tell me again Steve Like I'm a four year old

Sometimes I have some problems Following things The biggest difference is 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 bobsled than you will in two-man. Is that because there's all those people arguing at the back? Exactly, exactly. And there's the bigger, it's like the bumps in the back. Yeah, right. So 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 cutting up the track a lot more. Yeah. So you're doing a lot more havoc on the track. It's a lot heavier, which means the G-forces are

cutting up the track a lot more. 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 the two-man races. And yet in two-man, it's kind of more like a track and field where it's kind of like mano a mano, you're one push athlete, one driver, as opposed to a bigger team. See, as a pilot, you're the only guy that actually gets to do the whole thing with their eyes open. Clear. Exactly. Yeah. And now you kind of drive by wire.

So you're steering in this sort of handle thing. You don't have a wheel or anything like that. 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 you know the mbc cameras will be will be focusing on them and you'll see them going through their you know going through their mind and trying to drive the track that way and they're only having to drive this and then they're just letting don't you see them let the sled go like that because 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 every corner is different every corner is 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. Wow. You'll have other corners where you could get in super late, really deep into the curve.

You can get in, you're getting onto curves early and late. And you're not going to crash, but you're going to have to drive the sled really hard, which means just like if you think of somebody skating on ice, how do you skate on, how do you stop on ice? You, you turn your skates. Right. Well, bobsled, you have to turn the sled really hard. You have to turn those front runners really hard. You're doing a hockey stop. Wow. 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 other guys in the sled. And two, incorrect. Oh, wow. OK, cool. What are you guys doing as this is happening?

And can you can you affect the sled negatively while it's going down through the course? We're tweeting. sled negatively while it's going down through the course? We're tweeting. Getting some selfies for Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you got to check and make sure, see what everybody's saying. You are, when you're in the back of the sled, your job, your job is to move, move fluently with the sled.

I mean, you can't see anything. So you have to know the timing of every corner and every curve as they come gotcha with it because if you think about it if you're sitting in the passenger seat of a car and somebody's driving 100 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 right well if that happens if you don't know the turn is coming and you're going 100 miles an hour at a bop slide and the slide turns and you get pushed into the side of the sled you're going to throw that sled off it off on an angle because it's on ice so it's not it's not a case of like i push it that's my work done 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?

And move and move with. I mean, the important part of the push athlete's job is to push and accelerate that sled because that's the only time we as people have a chance to affect the acceleration of the sled. When the driver's in there, the driver's job is to drive as little as possible. So he or she is hockey stopping as possible down the track. And the push athlete's role is to move with it. So they're causing as little disturbance in that sled as possible. So 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 a build-up point of view? And how much do you get to practice on the track? Because this sounds really dangerous. Not much. No, not much. I mean, when you see the people competing in the Olympics this month in Korea, 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 oh my god 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 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 okay and no i mean's, you spend a month on ice before the season starts and you kind of remind your body what's happening and, and you'd mind your neck and your back. Cause that's really, you're, you're bent over in that sled. And that's when you've got five G's pushing you down like that, your neck and your back, it's pretty stiff and sore. So you just work through it and go, I mean, it's not that it's actually, it sounds a little scarier than it is to go through those kinds of G forces. It's more of the body just gets used to it. So, 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

It's more of the body just gets used to it So that mean there's got to be a lot of trust between you guys In other words, you get off the get off the sled and you say my back hurts only all you hear is a course of deal With it. Yeah Basically what that's basically what you're getting. I mean, it's yeah, so just say yeah me too so 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 and 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.

Absolutely. No, I mean, it's a team sport through and through, whether it's two-man or four-man or two-woman bobsled. It is a, or bobsleigh, depends upon, you know. Right. We're going with sled. Where you happen to be standing. And 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 40 or 50, 60 seconds of the run, depending upon which track you're on. And you have to have absolute confidence in your driver. And the driver has to have absolute confidence that 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 is part of that, just like the push athletes are part of, you know, making sure the sled is fast down the hill along with the driver. 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're kind of 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 yeah i mean there's hundreds of tiny little pin spikes on the bottom of those on the bottom of our tracks or our bobsled spikes yeah it's not like a track and field shoe there's like seven there's like hundreds of these little ones and they're like a brush uh on the bottom of the shoe and so your

your feet kind of stick like velcro like the little hooks in velcro all right nice and it's great when you're on there but yeah to your point you get in um you can ask my teammate kurt tomasevich uh what happens um i got in we got back from the track day one after our first uh the first race in vancouver so there two days of racing, two heats per day. Cumulative four heats. And we get back to the track. We get back to the Olympic Village after day one. And we had a great day.

We were up by, I think, 43 hundredths of a second, which is a lot of time in bobsled. It's a whole lot of time in bobsled. Wow. And, you know, the adrenaline of the day was starting to wear off. I hopped in the shower and all of a sudden I and I started yelling and I looked down and Kurt had, in fact, spiked me in the calf getting in earlier. 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 man sorry dude so when you guys when you guys are in how do you sync when you're running and pushing off is this uh internal timing

is there any communication between you while you're uh pushing off i mean how exactly do you time that out so that uh you know everybody's in the sled exactly when they're supposed to be? 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 communicate 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 everybody goes. You have 60 seconds to go and there's a clock that's coming down and you're allowed to go at any point in that 60 seconds. So what's the code?

What's the code between everybody? Every team is different. Our code was back set, the brakeman would yell back set, and then the 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. Wow, that's cool, man. All right. Your gold winning team is called the Night Train. It's called the Night Train. There's a reason, and you're going to please tell us.

Well, you know, the name actually came up because the sled, when we first got the sled, it was fast. It was fall of 2008, a couple years before the Olympics, and the sled was super fast. We were in training in Park City, and when 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 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 all right 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 slides were we need to get the hard coat on it do some things and we're like no no we don't need a hard coat just set into 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 way back in the day, and it was called the Night Train. And our slide engineer, Bob Cuneo, just thought that was a really cool idea,

and this slide 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 Cuneo. Gets all the credit. Fair enough. I couldn't be more American if you you called it the screaming Eagle mom train. So that's awesome.

It would have fit. It was a six minute slide. That would have fit. How do you look at it and say this sleds 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 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 yeah 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, we get on the track with it. And we'll use our old sled and our new sled. And we'll test back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And you're testing against, you know, on a track like Park City, which Steve Holcomb, our driver who recently passed away this year. Yeah, that's very sad.

I'm sorry. Thank you. 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 in the bottom of the sled. And we would just trade the sled back and forth and do everything else the same. And the sled was amazingly faster than the old one.

Wow. So we're running out of time here, but we'd be 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. You know, 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, 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. And we just thought, you know, my sister was getting her PhD in education. I was living this life with a 10-year-old kid and that's what I just thought was amazing. And we wanted to do something that would make a difference.

And Classroom Champions has turned into over 100 Olympians, Paralympians, college student athletes, NFL players, mentoring via technology, via Skype, via asynchronous 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 22nd, every single school in America is going to be able to talk to amazing athletes like Aaron Hamlin and Alana Myers-Taylor that you're going to see all over NBC and do a live chat with them. So folks can have Well done, you sir. Well done, the organization. Thank you. Hey, man, this was really cool talking to you. Thanks so much. I hope that we'll get to do it again, whether it's classroom champions or bobsledding 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. Thank you guys. I love everything you're doing and keep up the great work. Enjoy the Olympics. You too. Thank you. Steve Messler there.

Yeah, man. Former Olympic gold medal winner. Man, it must feel good to have. Winner, by the way. It's going to feel good, right? You know what I mean? I wish I would, if I had been, if I had won a gold medal for anything, like even if it was filled with chocolate. Okay.

I know what you're going to do. Yeah. Be like Chuck. Nice gold medal for anything, like even if it was filled with chocolate. Okay. I know what you're going to do. Yeah, be like, Chuck, nice gold medal chocolate winner. Yeah, gold fidget spinner. I don't care what it is you give me. Give me the gold. Give me the gold.

Oh, man. Oh, wow. Yeah, well, I hope you've enjoyed our show. Yes, it was a good one. Isn't that bobsled? Yeah, bobsledding. Bobsled or bobslay? It's an either or situation. It's bobsled. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Bob Sled? Yeah, Bob Sledding. Bob Sled or Bob Sleigh? It's an either or situation.

It's Bob Sled. Yeah, that's a done deal. Bob Sled. And if there is a Bob Sled out there, we like you as well, sir. Right. No, you didn't just do that. I did.

That's awesome. I couldn't resist it. Right. On that wonderful note, that's it from us. Bob Sled over and out. Hope you've enjoyed it. I am still Gary O'Reilly.

And I'm still Chuck Nice. See you soon.