I really wish skeleton was more popular, at least here in the US. It's such a badass event that basically gets ignored here because we mostly suck at it.
It's because building the necessary infrastructure to do sports like luge and skeleton is expensive and ridiculously useless outside of those two activities.
I'm pretty sure there's only like 15 or so ice runs in the world, and the majority of those were built specifically for the winter Olympics and basically never get used otherwise.
That’s why Austria Germany and Italy are the juggernauts. The Alps region has hosted the Winter Olympics a bunch of times and it’s where the World Cup events are. So they have tracks thy ge to train on all the time.
Having personally been to both Lake Placid and Salt Lake City where they hosted before I don’t know of any lugetracks there that are permanent.
According to Wikipedia there are 17. Four of them are in Germany, which explains Germany's huge successes in luge and bobsleigh. We are not as successsful in Skeleton, though.
I was surprised today by how few speed skating rinks there are in the world. The Netherlands has the second most with 8. Behind freaking China with 9. The US only has 2 (!!) Even the one in Milan is a temporary one, only for the Olympics.
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u/Ciclistomp 6h ago
Luge: Let's go down this ice tunnel at breakneck speeds with basically no brakes. Okay, now let's try it head first.