The luge event at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Games. Photo: Michele Roepke

BEIJING — USA Luger Chris Mazdzer, in his fourth Olympics, placed 8th today in the singles finals event at the Beijing 2022 Games. The 33-year old lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and baby son Nicolai, while training and competing at the Utah Olympic Park. Mazdzer won America’s first men’s singles luge medal in the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics, a silver.

Today he was 10th in run one, 9th in run two, and 8th in run three, the 4th run is then added together for the final result which for him was 3 minutes and 51.3777 seconds and that was 2.642 seconds behind the winning time.

After run number one, he was all smiles giving a shout-out into the camera to all his friends and supporters in Park City. That smile is a perspective of happiness to simply be there. Mazdzer had high hopes to slide singles and doubles in Beijing but crashed out of the roster possibilities for doubles with teammate Jayson Terdiman and also broke his foot luging earlier this season.

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In this gravity sport with no brakes, Mazdzer slid efficient lines but simultaneously put his foot down for a split second in the middle of run two. It was cold and clear with hard, fast ice.

Each track is unique as to the number and radius of curves and the slope of the track. Utah’s is a drivers track, China’s is a riders track. Park City’s 15 curve track is one of the fastest while Beijing’s, 16 curve track, nicknamed the “Dancing Dragon,” is the longest. Start times are crucial, with metal-spiked finger-tipped, ice-penetrating gloves, sliders can’t make time up, they can only have thousands of seconds siphoned off via minuscule mistakes. Luge is considered much more technical than bobsled or skeleton.

Mazdzer grew up in Lake Placid and he also competed on Dancing with the Stars. He finished as the highest American luger in Beijing, as three-time Olympian Tucker West from Connecticut, who had never placed in the top 20 in Olympics, placed 13th and first-time Olympian Jonathan Gustafson from New York ended up in 19th.

Three-time Olympic gold medalist Felix Loch of Germany finished in 5th today. Germany has four luge tracks in a country roughly the size of Texas. Opportunities to learn, let alone master, the Beijing track’s turns for foreigners prior to Games-time, were few and far between.

The gold was awarded to perennial powerhouse Germany’s 35-year-old Johannes Ludwig, Austria’s Wolfgang Kindl took the silver and the bronze medal went to Dominik Fischnaller from Italy.

Faischnaller was just off the podium in fourth in 2018 by two-thousandths of a second. Dominik is the boyfriend of Team USA luger Emily Sweeny who has recovered from the most dramatic luge crash in the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics and will compete in Beijing in two days.