Born to Luge

Continued from previous page

Prock's home has always been the breathtaking Stubaital, a lush valley in western Austria near the two-time Olympic city of Innsbruck, in which a line of small, immaculate villages climbs into the foothills of the Alps, each closer to the tourist's vision of The Sound of Music than the one before. It's an hour's drive to Germany and an hour's drive to Italy, and from the second-floor deck on the back of Prock's 10-bedroom guest house, the sky is filled with majestic gray rock promontories. Half an hour to the east, on a mountain called Patscherkofel, where Franz Klammer careened to his 1976 Olympic downhill victory (with nine-year-old Prock standing in the snow near the finish), is the Igls luge run.

During the start of the race, the spiked gloves of Hackl (left) and Prock allow them to dig into the ice and propel their sleds.   HEINZ KLUETMEIER

Here Hackl's and Prock's biographies diverge. Prock was an exceptional athlete from childhood. Like his sister, Angelika, three years older, he was an accomplished ski racer. He played soccer—"His first sport, his first love," says Brigitte—and even after taking up the luge he would continue to run track. In the Austrian equivalent of high school, Prock ran 22.8 seconds for 200 meters and 50.9 for 400, times that would win many conference meets in the U.S. He's now 6'1" and weighs 195 pounds, with the taut, rippling physique of a defensive back. He took to luge on a whim. "His father opened the newspaper one Saturday morning and saw that the Igls Sport Club was looking for development lugers, and he asked Markus if he would be interested," says Brigitte. "He decided to try it, and he liked it immediately."

OLYMPIC PREVIEW

Michelle Kwan Swedish Hockey Hockey Photo Act Medal Picks

SEARCH CNN/SI

Prock was 12. Within a decade he would be known as the greatest starter in the history of the sport, able to use his long arms and powerful back to push out of the chute and along the first 20 meters of the course with more force than any other slider. In a sport ruled by gravity, the start is critical.

Where Hackl went to grammar school, luge was offered as a gym-class alternative to soccer, skiing and volleyball, all of which seemed to require more dexterity than he possessed. "I was not the best at sports," he recalls, so he chose luge, which appeared sufficiently different from the others. Even now, as a two-time Olympic champion, the 5'10", 190-pound Hackl is decidedly unathletic, soft in most of the places where Prock is solid. While luging as a boy, he was not immediately impressive. "He participated with much enthusiasm, but nobody paid much attention to him," says Josef Lenz, a coach and pioneer in the sport who worked with Prock as a teenager.

But there was something about the luge that Hackl could wear down. He loved to tinker with mechanical things and was attracted to the intricacies of sled-building, a vital part of success in the sport. (In this way, luge is like auto racing; you can't win at Daytona without a good chassis.) Hackl served an apprenticeship as a metalworker, with an eye toward building better equipment. Even now he spends hours each day in a workshop in the basement of the national training center in Berchtesgaden. "Georg always has the best equipment," says German teammate Susi Erdmann, a two-time Olympic medalist who has known Hackl for 14 years.

When they reached the Olympics, in 1988, Prock was 23 and Hackl 21, and they were already among the best in the world. They were also the yin and yang of luge racers. Prock puts sliders in three categories: athletes, sled builders and drivers. Prock's athleticism is legend, as is Hackl's skill in the workshop. Both are outstanding drivers. But in Calgary they diverged again. Unnerved by warm weather and the resultant choppy ice, Prock slid poorly. Hackl adjusted his sled on the fly and held together for the silver behind Jens Müller of East Germany. (Hackl was a West German in those days.) Four years later in Albertville, Prock finished the first day's two runs in second place, just .011 behind Hackl. Then weather struck again. "We went to bed that night thinking, Perfect ice again, please," recalled Prock. "But I woke up in the morning and it was snowing, big flakes. I knew Georg would be faster than me." So Hackl was, expertly tweaking his equipment to meet the changing conditions and winning his first gold medal by .3 of a second.

Prock came to Lillehammer again as the favorite. This time the weather was perfect, the ice fast, and Prock led by .058 after three runs. Hackl's final run was superb, the second fastest of the day, placing enormous pressure on Prock, the last slider of the competition. Prock wobbled in Turn 10, losing precious ticks that consigned him to another silver. In terms of distance, Hackl had beaten him by the equivalent of 10 inches over more than three miles. Silence again. No hugs. No celebration.

"At the finish he was in such a state, like I have never seen him before," says Prock's teammate and close friend Markus Schmidt. "He was so loaded with anger that Hackl was in front of him again. After we got back to our room, he said, 'Again Hackl, he is always lucky.'"

Three years later, Prock rummages through his memory for an explanation. "Two weeks after the Olympics I had my tonsils out," he says. "I was very sick." He pauses and adds sheepishly, "It sounds like I have excuses every time." He then dismisses the 1994 defeat as fate alone. "One one-hundredth of a second, it is such a small margin that it can be only luck." No, it can be more than that. It can be nerves. Hackl has the best in his sport.

Pressure sliding is a contrary act. The driver is full of need, trying to will his sled down the run in the fastest time possible. Yet to best achieve this, he must be sublimely relaxed. A tense driver tightens up on the sled, causing unnecessary movement that can cost thousandths of a second by increasing wind resistance. In this way Hackl is almost a freak. "His mental strength is phenomenal," says German coach Thomas Schwab, a bronze medalist in doubles in the Calgary Games. "It really borders on virtuosity. Before he gets on the sled at the top of the run, he has gone through every situation that could possibly happen. As he slides, it seems to him that it has already happened before. He has this mystical air about him."

One cool evening last summer, Hackl sat near the window in his brother Michael's restaurant on a hillside overlooking Berchtesgaden. His girlfriend of seven years, Margit Datzmann, sat to his left as Hackl, fueled by two flagons of beer, explained the mental side of his sport. "During that one minute you slide down," he said, "your head must be clear of other thoughts." Here Datzmann placed her hands next to her temples, in the universal sign for tunnel vision. "This is typically Georg," she said. "For days, for weeks.... "

Away from luge Hackl is impish and adventuresome. During the summer of 1994 he and Datzmann took a three-week trip through the western U.S. in a rented RV, at times befriending fellow campers in the wilderness and teasing them with his celebrity, which he knows is minimal. He speaks only German in formal interviews, but after a few beers, his English flows comfortably. His sponsorship deal with Viessmann, a German heating company, supports him, and not long after Nagano, he'll probably become a coach. His spare relationship with Prock was fractured last winter when they took opposing sides in a controversy over whether Hackl's teammate Müller should be given World Cup points for a race in Latvia in which he crashed into a ladder inadvertently placed across the track. On the subject of his rival's nerves, Hackl is remorseless. "If Prock uses his potential completely, nobody can beat him," says Hackl. "But what is in his head, I cannot say."

What's in Prock's head is a Rolodex of demands and ready rationalizations, a running commentary between his backbone and his brain that Schmidt boils down to this: "Sometimes Prock is more nervous."

Prock argues that he's only normal. "You need to be nervous, a little bit," says Prock. "If I feel it too much, I tell myself, You don't have to prove anything to anybody. You've won too much already. It's a feeling almost like, Up yours, to everybody."

He is sitting in the backyard of his guest house. His parents live on the ground floor, while he, Christina—a junior high school teacher and former ski racer—and Nina, now 2 1/2, reside upstairs with that stunning mountain view. It is a storybook life in a storybook setting. Prock's sponsorship deal with Red Bull, a sports drink, supports him comfortably, and like Hackl, he also draws a salary from the military. But he knows that something is missing from the portrait. "The only thing I haven't won," Prock says. "An Olympic gold medal."

The start of the Nagano luge run is very steep; it tends to send sliders flying from the top, which dents Prock's customary edge. Wendel Suckow of the U.S. won the pre-Olympic test run in Nagano last winter, and as Hackl has said, "Suckow is an even worse starter than I am." It will not be easy for Prock to alter the course of this rivalry.

He squints into the sun coming off the mountain, and his brown eyes capture all its bright light. Suddenly he shrugs and then smiles broadly. "Sometimes the ones who win all the other races," Prock says, "are not the ones who win the biggest races." This is a reality he can accept. Or it is this year's excuse, already in place. His epitaph.

Issue date: February 9, 1998