The Olympics are a playground not just for athletes, but for historians as well. The Games are littered with sports that only see wide television coverage—or any coverage at all—once every four years, at least in the United States. The Winter Olympics have a very particular strain of these sports. While just about every country has a climate that allows for, say, running or swimming, a comparative few have the weather, topography, and resources to have a thriving winter sports culture.
For those countries that do have both hills and snow, though, there is a near-universal appreciation of the sled. Sleds are great even without snow—they might have been used to build the Egyptian pyramids—but are particularly great at high altitudes and latitudes, to move gigantic building materials in China, or food and belongings in pre-Columbian North America. But how in the world did this utilitarian origin give us luge, what appears to be a psychotically dangerous sport that requires athletes to blast down artificial ice tubes at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour while seated on the most minimalist fiberglass-and-steel object that could be recognizable as a sled? The story takes us on a journey from Germanic tribal wars against the Romans, to aristocratic and very bored Englishmen on vacation, to the world of highly advanced sports technology.
The Winter Olympics are necessarily limited to events that can all be traced back to a select few countries with the right winter climate. The most recent Summer Games boasted a whopping 51 different events or disciplines, many of which have multiple sub-events (“Athletics” covers every length and format of footrace, hurdles, long jump, pole vault, javelin, discus, decathlon, and more). The Winter Olympics has only 15.
A surprising number of these winter events involve bored Scandinavian soldiers. Skiing has a basically undateable history as a form of alpine transportation, but only begins to be documented as a recreational pastime in the Norwegian and Swedish militaries in the 1700s. Several Scandinavian nations had ski regiments even then; the earliest recorded use of ski troops was during Norway’s civil war, somewhere around 1200. The biathlon—cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting—has roots in civilian hunting, but it was the Norwegian military that turned it into a competition.
Other events are really just modernized and winterized ancient games. Curling comes from Scotland, but the concept of throwing (or pushing) one object at another object is about as old as games get. Ice hockey has precursors all over the world, but using a stick to hit an object (ball, puck, whatever) is pretty fundamental.
Then there’s luge. Luge is pure folly, a creation of bored, aristocratic, and sometimes destructive men on vacation. Do you remember ever being bored on vacation, and making up a game with a sibling—tossing seashells or creating an obstacle course in the hotel room? Now imagine that game ended up a heavily funded fixture at the freaking Olympics. That’s luge.
Luge first emerged in the late 1800s, in the Swiss Alps, and more specifically in two resort towns: Davos and St. Moritz. At the time, these towns were used as summer resorts by aristocrats from all over Europe for their clean, temperate, alpine air. The names and dates get a little fuzzy or disputed here, but some time, probably in the 1860s, somebody—maybe some German doctors, maybe a Swiss hotelier—decided that only operating these resort towns during the summer was leaving money on the table. Winter in the Swiss Alps is great, they thought, so how can we get people here?
Winter sports had been growing in popularity, around the same time that others—soccer, boxing—were codifying and formalizing their rules. It was the age of steam, making travel more accessible to some and leading to more formalized global structures. Kingdoms, empires, or fiefdoms were giving way to connected nations bound by a common identity of some sort. The Industrial Revolution also made many non-royals—industrialists—extremely rich for the first time. 