Close Encounters

By Sean Gregory

It's 23 below near the top of Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, N.Y., and U.S. lugers Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin are wearing skintight racing suits, perched atop a 2-ft.-wide sled. Martin sits behind Grimmette, legs straddling his teammate. "I've got no traction on my feet," yells Martin. Grimmette, like a longtime nanny, instantly wipes them down with his gloves. The pair, teammates for 10 years, alternate deep breaths. "All right, be aggressive," says Grimmette. "Yup," replies Martin. With that, the U.S.'s best-ever Olympic luge team shoots from the starting block. Now supine on the sled, they hit speeds of 80 m.p.h. on the icy track, Grimmette atop Martin the whole way down.

The Winter Olympics showcase some of the oddest-looking pairs in sports. Athletes endlessly tout the importance of chemistry, that unseen connection between teammates that boosts performance. Well, there's nothing unseen about the connections between the luge doubles. Or bobsledders: two- or four-person teams bunched together in a runaway rocket, heads buried in one another's backs as if expecting something terrible. Or the pairs figure skaters and ice dancers in their flashy outfits, bodies entwined, handling each other throughout their routines.

These athletes aren't conjoined just on the ice. Since most compete in low-revenue sports, the lugers, sledders and skaters often bunk up to save costs. Grimmette doubles as Martin's landlord, renting him a bedroom in his Lake Placid house; during the summer, a top Italian luge team, Gerhard Plankensteiner and Oswald Haselrieder, live and work together as forest rangers in Cortina. They share hotel rooms on the road and put in long hours prepping for competition. "We're like married couples," says Todd Hays, the top U.S. bobsled driver, sharing a sentiment echoed by dozens of athletes in these sports. Some skaters, in fact, do get hitched.

All that time in close quarters breeds a panoply of team dynamics--lasting friendships, near psychic synchronicity, petty sniping and, in the case of the skaters, love, marriage and divorce. "The codependency factor? It's through the roof," says Pavle Jovanovic, who lives in Calgary, Alta., with Steve Mesler and Brock Kreitzburg, his close friends and teammates in Hays' four-man bobsled. "I'm always telling [Mesler], Just because we live together, we don't have to do everything together all day. He tortures me." Hays is even more direct. "It's definitely a challenge just to keep from killing each other," he says.

In the bobsled, tensions often mount between the driver and the "brakeman," who helps push the sled at the start and stop it at the end--there's no actual braking on the course. "If you don't care for that person and you win, it's kind of a double-edged sword," says the U.S.'s top woman bob driver, former brakeman Shauna Rohbock. Last season she dropped a partner she couldn't stomach. "You're winning, and then you're like, 'I don't want her to do well.' But she was on the sled." How inconvenient.

Drivers swap brakemen like prom dates; soap opera surrounds the U.S. women's team like a Lake Placid cold front. Before the 2002 Olympics, driver Jill Bakken, the eventual gold-medal winner, jilted Rohbock, her partner of three years, for Vonetta Flowers. Jean Prahm dumped her best friend, Jen Davidson, for Gea Johnson. Now Prahm has picked Flowers, and after switching to the driver position, Rohbock is teamed with roommate Valerie Fleming. Bakken was back after a two-year hiatus but lost to Rohbock for one of two driver spots on the Olympic team. Got it? "There's so much drama, it's ridiculous," says Rohbock. A saving grace, she insists, is that the women now travel with the men on the World Cup circuit. Says Rohbock: "It's just been a good release to be with them and get away from the girls."

Partner swapping is less common in luge, since it takes years to get in synch. The top driver steers the sled through treacherous curves with his legs while the bottom driver rolls his shoulders to complete the turn. The key to doubles luge, says Italian coach Marco Andreatta, is "understanding each other only through physically feeling the athlete and knowing how to manage the reaction. You have to feel the sensations and interpret them as best you can."

That awkward contact presents another challenge for "sliders"--jokes from bemused spectators (the punch line of a Robin Williams riff on doubles luge: "Boys, get a room!"). Some brush them off: "If I wasn't luging, I'd be the one making fun of it," says Canada's Chris Moffat, a former singles rider now paired with younger brother Mike. Others take exception to the cracks. "O.K., we've heard the joke a million times," says Martin, 32, who won bronze with Grimmette in '98, silver in '02 and is chasing the U.S.'s first-ever luge gold.

At the rink, with so many partners ending up inand out ofromances, the athletes call the skating soap opera As the Blade Turns. "Being a skating partner is like being in a marriage, without the sex," says top U.S. ice dancer Ben Agosto, whose partnership with newly minted U.S. citizen Tanith Belbin, a Canada native, could yield the U.S.'s first ice-dancing medal since 1976. "Well, for some people." Agosto and Belbin are not romantically involved.

Since skating routines are inherently sensual, off-ice contact is inevitable. Love has certainly worked for Melissa Gregory and Denis Petukhov, the other top U.S. dancing pair. Gregory met Petukhov, a Russian, five years ago on an Internet message board for skaters. Petukhov flew to Colorado to test the pairing. "If it wasn't going to work, I was going to put him right back on the plane and say, 'Adios, I'm going to college,'" says Gregory. The pair clicked on the ice, started dating after about two weeks and were married in five months. Skeptics chirped that Gregory pulled a classic "Rent-a-Russian"--marry Petukhov so he can gain U.S. citizenship and qualify for the team. Gregory's response: "After we go to the Olympics and there's no divorce, then they'll start to come around and say, 'Oh, well, maybe we were wrong.'"

Some coaches encourage romance to create the chemistry that enchants skating judges. John Baldwin and Rena Inoue, an off-ice couple, won the 2006 U.S. title and are headed for Torino. Platonic pairs like the world's top ice-dancing team, Russians Tatiana Navka and Roman Kostomarov, must summon a skill so rare in great athletes--acting (ever see Shaquille O'Neal in Kazaam?). "Go to Hollywood, take some lessons," implores Russian coach Evgeny Platov, who despite a combustive partnership with Oksana (Pasha) Grishuk--"I went cuckoo"--faked love on ice to win gold medals with Grishuk in '94 and '98. Italian ice dancers Barbara Fusar-Poli and Maurizio Margaglio might have to pull an Oscar in Torino; they have consulted two psychologists to help them get along. But, insists Margaglio, "when I am on the ice, Barbara is my woman."

Lugers Martin and Grimmette don't have to fake friendship. But like any close couple, they have their heated squabbles, mostly over luge issues. Whether teammates break bread, share a bed or see red, all Olympic pairs must be their own worst critics in Torino because when you're sliding down a track at 80 m.p.h. or throwing a skating partner in the air, mistakes won't just hurt your score. Says Martin: "If we screw up here, the consequence is pain."

With reporting by Mary Jollimore/ Toronto, Mimi Murphy/ Rome, Grant Rosenberg/ Paris