Biggest lugers
Years after his father built him a luge track, Tucker West heads to Sochi
Mark MatchoTucker's father, Brett, built a luge track in the backyard after being inspired by the 2002 Olympics.This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Feb. 3 Music issue. Subscribe today!
能够圆梦的人，往往是自己创造条件去实现梦想。比如另一位无舵雪橇选手，美国大男孩塔克·韦斯特。今年18岁的他，是美国男子无舵雪橇队历史上最年轻的奥运选手。而他的奥运梦想，就源自自己家的后院。
2002年，塔克和他的父亲一起观看了盐湖城冬奥会无舵雪橇比赛。看完电视，老爸带着儿子就在自家院子里，用雪堆出了一条赛道。不过雪做的赛道，没过几天就融化了，为了解决这个问题，老韦斯特决定用木头给儿子修一条赛道。这项工程历时1年多才完成。他修的这条赛道，全长228.6米，那可真是蜿蜒曲折，上下翻飞。这条赛道后来还通过了康涅狄格州的质量认证。赛道上装有扩音装置、电子计时系统、夜间照明设备，甚至还有自动喷水浇冰系统。老韦斯特还为这条赛道设计了一个上坡赛段，他骄傲地说，全世界的无舵雪橇赛道里，有上坡赛段的只有两条，一条在索契，另一条就在我家后院。
从赛道建成之日起，冬奥会就成为塔克父子的终极梦想。小塔克每天都要在这条赛道上滑20到25趟。每一次滑行，他的老爸都会给他掐时间，报成绩，一切全照奥运会的规格来。后来美国雪橇队听说了这件事，专门邀请小塔克到曾经两次举办冬奥会的普莱西德湖参观，那是小塔克第一次在正规赛道上滑行。
塔克初中毕业后，就被招进了美国雪橇队的后备梯队，成绩也不断提升，最终在今年成功入围索契冬奥会的代表名单。
OLYMPIC DREAMS REQUIRE some level of delusion, a built-in resistance to statistics and physical sanity. The odds are so long and the demands so great. But when Brett West and his son Tucker, then just 6 years old, sat in their Ridgefield, Conn., living room and watched the luge events from Salt Lake City in 2002, the familial defiance of reason would soon surface in ways that set them apart from even the most weightless of fathers and sons.
"We just thought, Boy, doesn't that look like fun?" Brett remembers today. Almost immediately, he disappeared into the backyard and started building a run out of snow and ice. There are pictures of Tucker, smiling brightly, making his first slides on plastic toboggans. "I was just super stoked that we had this awesome sledding hill," the 18-year-old says today.
The problem with snow, of course, is that it melts, and most dads might have let their passion evaporate with it. "I came up with the dumb idea of building a wooden luge track," Brett says. Nearly every word of that sentence is an understatement. Brett is not a carpenter; he owns a media company. Without any of the requisite experience, he spent the next spring, summer and fall designing and building a run, complete with banks and drops and chicanes. Every Friday night, he would head to Home Depot and bring home another load of pressure-treated lumber and plywood, and every weekend, he and Tucker would measure and cut and bolt another section of track that, at its peak, extended 780 feet.
"It was a bit like Noah's Ark," Brett says. "The neighbors would come over and say, Whatcha building?'" The following winter, an expectant Brett iced down the chute with a garden hose and prepared to launch its first test subject: a bowling ball. The ball clattered and caromed down the track -- until it reached what the Wests were already calling Devil's Curve. That's where the ball went airborne, rocketing over the side and crashing into the trees. Father and son shared an uneasy moment of silence.
Brett broke down the curve and rebuilt it, and after sleds loaded with sand had found their way safely to the bottom, the West Mountain Luge Run was ready for human trials. Tucker insisted on the honor. Brett took a position in the middle of the run, "ready to perform CPR if needed," he says, mostly joking. (He had also stacked hay bales, just in case.) But the track, and Tucker, performed beautifully. "It was quite the experience," he says. "I went straight down, and I'm still alive to this day."
The backyard luge track fast became a local legend, attracting kids and adults alike, a frozen Field of Dreams. Brett continued to tinker: PA and irrigation systems, banners and electronic timing completed the homegrown Olympic experience. Tucker diligently practiced his form, even riding a wheeled sled down the chute during summers. Within a couple of years, word had spread farther afield of the family and their unlikely obsession. "I heard about this nutjob in Connecticut who'd built a luge track in his backyard and decided to pay a visit," says Gordy Sheer, a silver medalist and today the marketing director for USA Luge.
Sheer brought his medal to Ridgefield, and backyard dreams suddenly became something more real. He invited the Wests to Lake Placid to try out the Olympic run. "It was so fast and smooth," Tucker says. "I just loved it." The Wests joined the Adirondack Luge Club and began making frequent trips to Lake Placid, plywood having been replaced with concrete, lunacy with possibility. Together they made run after run down the mountain, the son soon overtaking his father, each chasing his love.
In December in Park City, Utah, Tucker raced his way onto the Olympic luge team, the youngest American man ever to make it. Brett West was there. "Like Noah, I felt somewhat vindicated," he says with a laugh. "I can't really describe the moment. Your kid making the Olympic ..." and he trails off. He's thought about tearing down the old track, which doesn't get used much anymore, but Tucker has asked him to keep it up. It still stirs something inside him, even just seeing it, banking crooked through the trees. "I'm just so thankful my dad did that and we got to share that experience together," he says. Lugers know better than most the importance of starts.
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