Mount Van Hoevenberg: North America's First Bobsled Run
Near Lake Placid, New York
A few miles southeast of the village, at Mount Van Hoevenberg, is a place that helped introduce an entire sport to North America. When Lake Placid won the nineteen thirty two Olympics, organizers needed a bobsled run, and there was no proper run on the continent. So they built one here, among the first purpose-built bobsled tracks in North America.
A Polish engineer named Stanislaus Sentzytsky designed a course roughly a mile and a half long with twenty six curves, following the natural contours of the mountain's north slope. It opened on Christmas Day of nineteen thirty. In those early days, athletes rode wooden sleds with metal runners, steering by feel down a chute of banked ice at frightening speed.
The nineteen thirty two games introduced the two man bobsled event here, and American sliders won gold in both the two man and four man races. The venue was used again for the nineteen eighty Olympics and remains an active sliding center today, hosting bobsled, luge, and skeleton, the sport where athletes race down the track head first. Visitors can even book a ride down the track alongside a professional driver.
