OUT THERE: Olympic lugers take up wake surfing on Lake Placid

Olympic lugers surfing on Lake Placid

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Brian Martin surfed up the pale green wave into the froth on top, then sliced down and up in a series of short turns, his muscular torso twisting each time.

He even walked the seven-foot surfboard to its nose, within a few feet of the motorboat whose wake he rode in the lake rimmed by Adirondack mountains.

It’s a tough move that requires balance, focus and a feel for the board. Martin made it look easy using skills he’s honed in luge as an Olympic silver medalist and national doubles champion.

Lake Placid has deep roots in winter sports from the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics, and now some of its lugers have taken up surfing behind a motorboat on the village’s namesake lake in New York’s northern mountains.

“It looks easy. It’s not easy at all,” Gordy Sheer said. The 38-year-old USA Luge marketing director and 1998 Olympic luge doubles silver medalist was driving the old boat with the eight-cylinder inboard engine that Martin, luge partner Mark Grimmette and Sheer bought last year and have weighted down so it throws a bigger wake.

Martin, a 35-year-old Californian, learned to surf in high school. “It’s a lot of fun and really enjoyable thing to do on an afternoon,” he said.

A few years before that, USA Luge Slider Search had brought a sled on wheels to his hometown of Palo Alto. That first ride was “awesome,” Martin recalled. A month later, he got a letter inviting him to try it on an actual luge track at Calgary. He was 14.

“The first run on ice was even more unbelievable. You’ve now got the banked curves. You’re getting up on the curves,” he said. “You’re not going from the top of the track. You’re actually going pretty slowly, but it felt like 100 miles an hour.”

“Later that winter I came to Lake Placid,” he said. “I’ve been coming to Lake Placid ever since.”

Grimmette began surfing occasionally with his stepfather on Lake Michigan, a half-mile from his boyhood home of Muskegon. When a luge track was built nearby he volunteered to help, and at 14 he began sliding. “I fell in love with it,” the 38-year-old said. Three years later he was invited to Lake Placid.

They’ve been a team since 1996, overall World Cup champions three times, winning the silver medal in Salt Lake City in 2002. The upcoming season begins in November. The Olympics are set for February in Vancouver.

Sheer learned to surf on vacations. As a 12-year-old from New York’s Hudson Valley, he copied down a phone number for USA Luge that he saw on a van while visiting Lake Placid. He and partner Chris Thorpe won the Olympic silver medal in 1998 in Nagano, Japan.

There had been an occasional wake surfer on Lake Placid before, but it began to take off two years ago with the lugers’ friend John Viscome. He had an ankle injury and didn’t want to ride a wakeboard with bindings. There happened to be two surfboards in the USA Luge office that were used for paddle training. A small group got started.

Slower than wakeboarding or water skiing, wake surfing is done much closer to the boat and without a rope, except to get started.

“And it started to snowball,” said Viscome, who has yet to surf on the ocean. There are a handful of boats and groups on the lake now, and the sport has taken off nationally as well. Several companies now make specific boards.

Another friend jokingly dubbed it the Lake Placid Surf Club. YouTube videos have had thousands of hits.

“There’s no membership, no dues,” Sheer said. “If you do it, if you ride behind a boat on Lake Placid, I guess you’re a member of the surf club.”

Since getting their own boat last year, the lugers have probably taught more than a dozen people.

“You have to find your own way up,” Martin said. “You get up once, you get up. You figure it out. It’s repeatable.”

All three started lying on the board behind the boat on the port side, holding a short tow rope with one hand. Once it reached 10 or 11 mph, the wave formed 2 feet high behind it.

Martin jumped up immediately then. Grimmette went from stomach to knees, then up. Sheer stood as the boat first accelerated. They steadied themselves then threw the rope onboard. Most rides lasted minutes, until a turn went too high up the wave or too far out or back.

“Go right up to the top of it — I love that feeling because you’re floating up there,” Grimmette said. “What’s great about surfing is we do a lot of balance training. The surfboard stuff is perfect for this.”

Their daily training includes weights, running, balance and agility drills, and later sport-specific training like starts on the three frozen indoor start ramps inside the USA Luge center in Lake Placid. The best sliders have quick, explosive strength, making them fast on starts, as well as good body control and kinetic awareness, so they can keep the luge within an inch or two of an ideal line down a winding track at 90 mph, without picking up their heads to look.

“The similarity between the two sports, sliding and wake surfing, is that feel,” Sheer said.

An entire World Cup season’s championship has turned on thousandths of a second.

Experience is another key, since runs are short, usually less than a minute. Runs are filmed and studied.

“We’re not as a group the same personality set as say … your extreme athletes. Our guys tend to be a little bit more analytical and cerebral,” Sheer said.

On Lake Placid, they had ongoing discussions about wave shape, boat speed, shifting weight forward or back, why the board was tending to pearl, or nosedive. They each took two long sessions and smiled a lot.

Now they’re thinking about using two boats to make a wave wedge, Sheer said, which they’ve seen on YouTube. “It’s one of our goals for the summer.”

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