Pierre Lueders

Posted: Wed February 4, 1998

Pierre Lueders, the best two-man bobsled driver in the world, used to steer through a tight corner with his eyes wide open but seeing only blackness in the turn, a refrigerated tunnel of love he would navigate at speeds of more than 80 mph. He calls the phenomenon "driver's blindness." The only known cure is experience, and at 27, Lueders, a square-jawed, clenched-fisted Canadian, now has that. He sees more each time he goes down the track, and as his vision has improved, other senses necessary for his sport have been heightened as well. "My feel with the sled is better in my hands and in my butt," Lueders says.

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Bobsledding was Lueders's second, or maybe 11th, sporting choice. He was a decathlete until August 1989, when he visited relatives in what was then East Germany. His cousin Gunnar Meinhardt, a sportswriter, pointed out that the 6'1", 218-pound Lueders didn't project as a future 8,500-point decathlon man, but that his size, strength and explosiveness might help make him a world-class bobsledder.

Lueders began as a brakeman in 1989, graduated to the front of the sled in '91 and in 1992 won the first World Cup race he entered. His driving philosophy was cogent if not nuanced: Last one down is a rotten egg. He never knew bobsledding could be so easy—then realized that it wasn't. "I hadn't paid my dues to be a contender," says Lueders, who finished seventh in the two-man at the 1994 Olympics. "I thought I could just slip in and steal the show. Looking back, I realize there's a time and place for things."

Well, Feb. 15 looks like the time and Nagano looks like the place. Lueders won three of the six two-man races on this winter's World Cup circuit with three different brakemen (he will race with longtime partner Dave MacEachern at the Olympics), and finished second and third in two other races.

Nothing—not even an intrusive TV cameraman covering a race last December in La Plagne, France—has stood in the way of Lueders, who is a four-time World Cup season champion. The cameraman had his lens less than a foot from Lueders's face as the clock for Canada I's start wound down, and Lueders decided the time had long passed for a s'il vous plaît. He says he pushed the cameraman aside; according to newspaper accounts, Lueders punched him. It was all sorted out following Lueders's victory, without help from Johnnie Cochran, whose services would almost certainly have been useful to Lueders a few years back.

"The difference between me now and me in Lillehammer is that in 1994 I was a wildfire burning out of control," says Lueders. "I'm still intense, but now my intensity is in a fireplace, where I can contain and control it. Knowing when to turn it up is the key."

Unlike the Nagano Olympic torch, Lueders's flame won't go out.      

—Michael Farber

Issue date: February 9, 1998