I'm an Olympiad and I Have the Pin to Prove it!

"I should have been a bobsledder!" he says as he points to the sky.

Every few years the winter Olympics comes around and the entire family is subjected to a tirade of mysterious expertise on bobsledding, luge, and skeleton from Gordon.  So when the big five-OH came around and he begged and pleaded for that birthday fishing trip, we did what any good family member would have done.  We took him bobsledding.

It would be hard to describe the shock-and-awe you get when you stand on a bridge, five feet above the bobsled track as the four-man fiberglass coffin goes raging past at 70 miles an hour.  Suffice it to say, the TV does absolutely no justice to the 007-style danger that bobsledders live for. The back end of the sled is literally fish-tailing down the track. And, according to our newly-pinned Olympiad, everything starts out smooth enough, but about 20 seconds in, the sled starts shaking, and by the time you get up to full speed you feel like your entire body will be rattled apart. It was 47 seconds of sheer terror that's over as fast as it began. And, later when we stopped for that gold medal bottle of recovery whiskey, the liquor store man told us, "That's the fastest time he's ever heard of from a tourist!"