(L-R) Chris Mazdzer and Jayson Terdiman pose after the men's doubles race at the 2021 FIL Luge World Cup on Dec. 18, 2021 in Innsbruck, Austria.
BEIJING — In the past quarter century, USA Luge has brought home six Olympic medals, winning the coveted hardware at every Winter Olympic Games but two.
On a unique “flowy” track at the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, Olympic veterans Chris Mazdzer (2018 Olympic silver medalist), Tucker West, Summer Britcher and Emily Sweeney all have a shot at the podium, as do the first-timers Jonny Gustafson, Ashley Farquharson, and the doubles team of Zack DiGregorio and Sean Hollander, who teamed together just 16 months ago.
But the event where the U.S. is perhaps the strongest is the team relay, scheduled for Feb. 10. In this race, each country’s fastest female and male sliders and doubles team race serially down the track, slapping a paddle at the finish to “tag” their team’s next sled.
At the Yanqing World Cup in November 2021, the U.S. team won a silver medal here. That team consisted of Farquharson, West, and doubles veterans Mazdzer and Jayson Terdiman.
While Farquharson and West both made the 2022 U.S. Olympic Team (along with Mazdzer in singles), Mazdzer and Terdiman did not qualify for the team. Instead, Zack DiGregorio and Sean Hollander — both age 20 — are making their Olympic debuts here at the Beijing Games.
DiGregorio and Hollander have never competed in a team relay before — although they have practiced. But they have a “secret weapon” and have had a crash course in sliding given by none other than Terdiman himself, a consummate team player who swallowed his disappointment at not making his third Olympic team to help his teammates.
Not only did Terdiman, 33, spend eight days in Park City, Utah, helping DiGregorio and Hollander improve their sliding, he is also letting them use the sled that he purchased earlier this season — the “secret weapon” that he hoped would carry him and Mazdzer to the medal stand in Beijing.
Hollander, among the entire USA Luge team, called Terdiman an “amazing teammate” and noted that adapting to a new sled went “smoother than anyone expected.” And the sled, he noted, is faster than the doubles sled that they had been using.
“It meant the world to us,” added DiGregorio. “It really showed us what a teammate supposed to be like.”
The Olympic Team Race-Off
As the 2022 Olympic qualifying period came to an end this January, no U.S. doubles team had met the qualifying criteria to make the 2022 U.S. Olympic Team. Mazdzer had broken his foot while training in September, so he and Terdiman had missed crucial preseason training.
They were starting to come up to speed as the qualifying period ended and were the highest ranked of the three U.S. doubles teams competing on the world cup this year. But to make the team, they would have finish ahead of their teammates in the Nation’s Cup race that preceded the Sigulda World Cup in Latvia in early January.
