Sports, especially the more obscure Olympic ones, generally have a logical entry point. It’s easy to imagine a sprinter getting into sprinting because one day they ran to or from something well enough to get a sponsorship out of it. Others take a more concerted effort. No one would get into curling by accident unless they were hanging out in a tundra with bored blackout drunks and access to brooms and large stones.
And then there’s luge, an Olympic sport I enjoy watching even though every second I do is overwhelmed by this background hum of a thought that I never shake: how the hell do people get into this in the first place?
After having that thought kick around in my head every fourth February, I finally decided to find an answer. But first, a quick distinction: luge, skeleton, and bobsled are three separate Olympic sports that all play off the same idea and are all distinct from one another.
All three involve athletes shooting down a long, icy tube that feels like a long roller coaster built explicitly to infuriate safety inspectors. Bobsled is the one where a team of 2 to 4 people rocket down the icy tube in an aerodynamic coffin, reaching speeds of up to 90 miles an hour. Skeleton is an individual sport where an athlete shoots down the icy tube headfirst on a sled while lying on their stomachs, hitting an average speed of somewhere in the upper 80s. Luge is the same idea but faster, hitting speeds of around 90 miles an hour, while the athlete is lying on their back on a sled that’s harder to control than either of the previous two variations.
All three raised the question of how people got into this stuff in the first place, but luge is the specific one that bugged me for all these years. It turns out that most future lugers start young. This site detailing the youth luge program offered by Utah’s Washatch Luge Club says it’s a single-session beginner youth luge program that begins around eight years old.
One American luger competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan is Sophia Kirby. She started at eight years old with the Adirondack club in upstate New York, coincidentally not too far away from Lake Placid, the site of the 1980 Winter Olympics. By age 10, she had been noticed by USA Luge’s development team. By her teens, she was on the junior national track. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, child lugers don’t have obnoxious over-edited mix tapes made about them that spread on social media like child basketball players, so you would never have known of her rise through the ranks.
Cold, icy, snowy cities are obvious hotbeds of luge activity, but they aren’t the only ones churning out lugers. USA Luge, the sport’s governing body in the United States, runs “Slider Search” programs that sound less like a clear road toward Olympic gold and more like a Jackass stunt that will end with you in a full body cast.
In non-winter months, recruiters will block off a hilly road, slap kids onto wheeled sleds, and essentially kick them down the hill and wish them good luck. Kids as young as nine can walk up and try it out for free. If they’re good, they get an invite to a proper ice track in Lake Placid or Park City, Utah.
In the video above, from NBC’s Boston affiliate, Olympic luger Nick DiGregorio seems to imply that he had no passion or even concept of luge until one of these slider search events was happening in his city, so he gave it a shot and fell in love. Fast forward to 2026, and DiGregorio is competing in the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics in the luge doubles event.
There are youth luge leagues, too, where kids learn fundamentals and basic sled control before ever seeing the top of a track. At places like Muskegon’s Youth Luge League, athletes are taught sled mechanics and steering, hitting top speeds of 30 mph. To a beginner, that probably feels like breaking the sound barrier.
Luge is a relatively small sporting community, but not everyone who tries it goes full Olympian. You may have noticed that it’s a terrifying and dangerous sport. That alone is enough to steer some into safer directions, but for those kids starting early, the ones who get an early hang of the nuances of steering and have a tolerance for its high speeds, there could be an Olympic event or two in their future.
