They were best friends and neighbors, a couple of Lake Michigan kids who knew that the best way to take advantage of the cold and the snow of Muskegon, Mich., was to become one with the cold and the snow. So four hours at a time, week after frosty week, Mark Grimmette and Jim Rudicil would lug their sleds through the woods near their homes to their favorite hill.
“Time melts away when you’re having that much fun,” Rudicil said yesterday.
Except there came a day deep in the winter of 1985 when the men with the hard hats and the bulldozers arrived, looking to a couple of teen-agers like they were preparing to dig and chop and hack all the fun away forever, one frozen pile of earth at a time. They couldn’t just let this happen, of course, so they found a man who looked to be in charge.
“What are you doing?” the boys asked.
“We’re building a luge track,” the man in charge said.
Twenty-five years later, Jim Rudicil laughs over the telephone when he recalls that story. “A luge track? What in the world was that? But then he explained it to us. And he asked us another question: ‘Do you want to help us?’ ”
The two friends looked at each other, realizing they weren’t going to be doing any sledding for the foreseeable future. So they grabbed a couple of boards and dragged them up the hill. Later, they would actually pound hammer and nail and help to construct what became the Muskegon Winter Sports Complex, one of only three public luge tracks in the United States.
Neither kid could know it, but they had just had a door opened to the rest of their lives. Rudicil is now the complex’s executive director, and if you can make it to Muskegon — three hours from Chicago, three hours from Detroit — and you bring $40 with you, they will provide you with a sled, a helmet, 2 hours of track time and enough instruction that you probably won’t kill yourself as you make your way down the hill.
“Wear old clothes,” Rudicil suggests. “I hate to see folks show up with a $300 Columbia jacket because then a $40 trip down the hill can become a lot more expensive than it ought to be.”
Grimmette, meanwhile, not only took to the sport, he inhaled it, embraced it, and became one of his country’s most expert practitioners of it. This will be his fifth Olympics, and along with doubles partner Brian Martin he already has won two medals — a bronze at Nagano in 1998 and a silver four years later in Salt Lake City.
Four years ago they crashed at Turin and pondered retirement, but decided to make one last run at it this year and squeaked in, winning a race-off at the Trials.
And tonight, Grimmette, 39, will earn one of the grandest honors an Olympian can achieve, voted by his fellow U.S. athletes to carry the American flag into BC Place Stadium during the Opening Ceremonies.
“I’m still shaking,” Grimmette said yesterday after he was informed of the honor, a nice bookend to 2002, when he was one of eight athletes chosen to walk the Ground Zero flag into the Opening Ceremony at Salt Lake City.
“I was incredibly surprised when Brian told me, and I’m still trying to process it all. To be the person leading the U.S. team into the opening ceremony is just such a great honor.”
Back in Muskegon, his old friend found it impossible not to talk about all of this without his voice catching. There will be a viewing party tonight in the lodge near the complex, and there will be an even bigger gathering on Wednesday, when Grimmette and Martin will make their first run at the Whistler Sliding Centre in Vancouver.
“I’m just ecstatic for him,” Rudicil said. “And for us.”
Twenty-five years after helping to carve a track of dreams into the side of a hill in Michigan, the final few steps of that vision will take place in a crowded arena in Canada. Sometimes a crazy dream really can take you all over the world.
Games at a glance
* Tonight’s opening ceremonies will be held indoors for the first time, with lots of guessing on which Canadian will light the cauldron inside the domed BC Place arena. Wayne Gretzky is a popular pick. So is Betty Fox, mother of late runner Terry Fox, whose 1980 cross-country marathon raised millions for cancer research. And the choice of Canadian Alpine skier Jan Hudec? Pamela Anderson.
* There’s also been avid speculation — based partly on TV footage and Internet-posted photographs — that two cauldrons might be lit, one inside BC Place Stadium and one in a plaza overlooking the downtown waterfront.
* Social media are abuzz with reports, based on the dress rehearsal, of some of the performers expected to appear — among them Bryan Adams, Nelly Furtado, Sarah McLachlan and k.d. lang.
* More than 2,500 athletes are expected at these Olympics. The parade of nations at the opening ceremonies starts with Greece and ends with the host country. The U.S. is scheduled to march 82nd.
