In a sport in which thousandths of a second make the difference between medaling or not, equipment matters big-time. It takes engineering, innovative materials, skilled manufacturing and custom assembly to make a top-tier sled. Some of that comes from big companies such as Dow and Norton, but with the USA Luge governing body based in Lake Placid, some of its key tech teammates are in northern New York as well.

They didn’t go to Pyeongchang, South Korea, but they made sure to watch the Olympic luge races back home.

Maker and designer

When Chris Mazdzer of Saranac Lake earned a silver medal at the end of his fourth run Sunday, Feb. 11, Placid Boatworks owner Joe Moore saw a sled he helped build in his factory on Station Street, Lake Placid. Moore, who is usually busy making canoes, has been making the pods — luge jargon for seats, or shells — for USA Luge and other countries as well.

Here is a look at one of the luge pods being manufactured at Placid Boatworks in Lake Placid. (Photo provided)

“I was watching Chris after the third run, and they pick up the sled after they’re done, and ours are very distinctive because you’ll see on the inside two strips of yellow on the sides and a strip of carbon black down the center,” Moore said.

Douglas Bohl, an associate professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at Clarkson University in Potsdam, was also watching the pod, because he had a hand in designing it. Five years ago, he, another Clarkson engineering professor and a graduate student used mathematical modeling to create a method by which a pod mold could be customized to a slider’s body.

“That shell was worked on mostly in 2013 and was fabricated in the fall of that year,” Bohl said in a press release from Clarkson. “It was too late to get onto the sleds in Sochi [Russia, for the 2014 Winter Olympics], but U.S. athletes used it the following year and since then.”

Mazdzer was their test subject. According to a recent report in the Watertown Daily Times, they used his dimensions to build a model, then tested it for aerodynamics and comfort.

“We wanted to make a happy slider,” Bohl told the Times. “The comfort is the most important part.”

Here is a look at one of the luge pods after it is manufactured at Placid Boatworks in Lake Placid. (Photo provided)

Bohl is a slider himself. He told the Times he got into it after spending a winter as a luge parent, watching his son try the sport. He was president of the amateur Adirondack Luge Club for four years, until July 2017.

He said he was excited to watch Mazdzer win the silver medal and does not want to take any credit away from him.

“He did the hard work; we just applied a little math,” he told the Times. “He is a wonderful guy, and this is about him.”

Freelance luge builder

The man who put these North Country connections together is Duncan Kennedy, a three-time Olympian in the 1980s and ’90s who became the most decorated American luger in history up to that point. His voice should be familiar to anyone who has watched Olympic luge on television; he was NBC’s luge commentator in Pyeongchang, as he has been for every Winter Olympics since 2002. He grew up in Lake Placid and still lives here.

He also builds Olympic sleds out of his garage.

Kennedy has worked for USA Luge, both as as a development coach and sled tech director. It was under his direction that the Clarkson engineers were brought in to help design pod molds. But the organization let him go after the 2014 Sochi Olympics, so he went into business by himself, seeking work from other countries under the name Kennedy Racing Sleds.

“It felt like I was crashing a party that I wasn’t invited to in my own house,” he told North Country Public Radio for a recent story, but he managed to build a client base.

First came India and its six-time Olympic luger, Shiva Keshavan. Through Kennedy, Clarkson and Placid Boatworks work with Keshavan as well. Bohl said Keshavan used “our newer-generation shells” in these Olympics. Moore, on Facebook, recently shared a photo of Keshavan going down the Pyeongchang sliding track and wrote, “Another athlete riding one of our sleds.”

Romania is another of Kennedy’s client countries, using pods made by Placid Boatworks. NCPR reported that, with a Kennedy sled, Romanian Raluca Stramaturaru climbed from the World Cup rankings basement to claim some top-10 finishes.

“I found the pleasure to slide again,” she said, “because [Kennedy’s] equipment gives you the confidence that you need.”

She placed seventh this week in the Olympics, a huge achievement for her.

The U.S. is not among the eight countries that use Kennedy sleds, but it does use Placid Boatworks.

“We literally built a dozen pods for them this year,” Moore said of USA Luge.

Assembly and tinkering

Each luge sled has a pod, two candy-cane-shaped runners called kufens, two steels that dig into the icy track and two metal bridges that hold it all together. Each athlete assembles his or her sled, checks and rechecks it, and stays up late tinkering with it. They spend more time working on their sleds than they do sliding on them.

“We get equipment that’s pretty much made, but it hasn’t been customized yet,” Mazdzer said in an October 2017 interview with the Lake Placid News. “And then once it’s here, that’s when we go to the workshop to start customizing everything. We’ll get raw steels, and now you have to bend them. You have to put a roll into them. You have to shape them. And that takes, sometimes if you’re lucky, eight hours or a couple days.

“The steels and the kufens don’t just magically fit together. So what needs to happen is that the bottom of the kufen needs to be shaped, and the steel needs to be shaped so they can go together harmoniously. We’re timed to the thousandth of a second, so it’s all about precision. And when you’re going 70, 80 miles per hour down an ice track, you want the sled to go straight.”

A tenth of a millimeter makes a difference.

“Your eyes can get going a little crazy when you are looking at a ruler,” Mazdzer said. “We do have a device that can measure to the 100th of a millimeter that way, but it can be a little too time-consuming to use that.”

Then, he said, “When we’re at the track, we make a lot of changes to our sleds, so we’re using tools to make changes on the fly.”

Erin Hamlin, the 2014 Olympic bronze medalist, joined Mazdzer for that October interview. She said she tries to tinker with her sled as little as possible.

“I have pretty much a ballpark setup that I have stuck with for a while,” she said. “Once I find something that I like to ride on that feels comfortable, that works well for me, I generally try and stay pretty close to that same thing.

“I know Chris has had a little bit of a different scenario. He’s a lot bigger than me, so he’s had to play around with different options.”

“This year, I’ve tried three pods, broken a pair of kufens, used three others and have switched between four pairs of steels,” Mazdzer said.

More tinkering is done when things aren’t going well — as with Mazdzer going into these Olympics. He has been open about how, in what he described as a “dark cave” of frustration, he tore down and rebuilt his sled right before the games, experimenting with various setups and asking other sliders to try theirs to see what might work for him.

Whatever he did, it worked.