PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – They are united here, at the Winter Games, at the bottom ranks of a sport considered among the most dangerous and daring, flopping belly first on a heavy sled and rocketing headfirst down a twisting and swirling ice track at 80 mph.
It’s called skeleton, not because of what may break, but because of the bony appearance of the sled (or from a corruption of a Norwegian word for sled, “kjaelke”). Some call it plain crazy.
The two skeleton athletes here from Jamaica and Ghana, two countries where there is very little natural ice, if any, were apprehensive, too, at first, neither of them knowing much about the sport before giving it a shot.
Skeleton is like you remember from your local sledding hill, when school was closed for a snowstorm. But at 80 miles per hour. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)Anthony Watson, 28, a sometime actor from New Jersey representing Jamaica through his father’s lineage, recalled lying on the sled a few years ago as a training coach lifted his legs before that first run down, way down.
“He didn’t tell me anything,” he recalled. “He was just like, ‘All right, see you at the bottom,’ and he just shoved me on the track.”