Kaysha Love knows good music. R&B, country, rock, rap; the world championship-winning bobsledder says her teammates know hitting shuffle on her playlists can be dangerous. But to make it through the nearly eight hours a week bobsledders must spend sanding the runners of their sleds – someone has to make it a party.
For many athletes, taking care of equipment involves little more than throwing a kit in the washing machine after training. But Love, a former track and field athlete, said most bobsled athletes also operate as a full-time tech team. They service and detail their sleds daily, manage transporting them and decide which runners – the blades the sled runs on – to use for each track.
“The runners are probably the most important and most misunderstood part of our sport,” Love said. Bobsled tracks seem smooth but depending on the hardness of the ice and the quality of the track itself (Love said sometimes holes in the ice lay bare the supporting concrete below), by the end of the week, the runners can be so scratched up they effectively are unusable. “A polished runner can be the difference between first place and last place,” Love said, calling them the most “sacred” part of a bobsled athlete’s equipment.
Hence the "sanding parties," when runners are sanded and polished every single week – an endurance exercise that takes a full day’s work.
“Each runner starts out super scratched, really dull, this cloudy steel that’s just been battered through a week of training and competing,” Love said. “And little by little, stroke by stroke they transform into this beautiful mirror.”
Making it smooth
Unlike figure skates, or hockey blades, bobsled runners are not sharp. Made from steel, they are rounded, so that the sleds slide down the track, as opposed to carving a path like other on-ice sports. Runners can last years if properly cared for, and athletes often will be quite proprietary over them. They can cost anywhere from $6,000 to $20,000, and Love said without the support of USA bobsled sponsors, and the efforts of their team mechanic, Mark Van Den Burg, there would have been no way she could have afforded her own.
Starting with 100-grit sandpaper and going all the way down to diamond paste, Love and her team complete up to 2000 strokes for each of the eight runners, until they are fully restored. “The concept of what we are doing is brutal,” Love said. “It’s terrible having to stand for eight extra hours after training. Everyone’s exhausted. So, we bring out the big speaker, bring out the candy and the snacks, and make it fun.”
Keeping spirits high particularly is important for sliding athletes, whose competition season can especially be grueling. From November to March, teams may compete in a new location every single week. Athletes can be located in Austria one week, South Korea the next, and China the week after that. Very few will take time to return home in between, arriving at a new location on Sunday or Monday, training on the track Tuesday and Thursday, holding meetings and off ice training on Wednesday, a rest day on Friday, and competing on Saturday and Sunday, before travelling to start over once again.
And in between it all, teams – comprising a pilot, like Love – and two brakemen, must find time to service their sleds and runners.
Sanding parties are everybody coming together and laughing, and sharing, and dancing, and sometimes, crying after a hard week or a hard day.
Team building
Sanding parties have been a tradition in the sport for years, and Love realized how much these hours spent together bonded their teams. She decided to take responsibility for the parties, seeing them as an opportunity to bring positivity to the hard work behind the races.
Her efforts have given back more than she could have asked for. As a competitor in monobob – a category in which she slides alone in her sled – Love has been blown away by the fact that her two-woman teammates still will help her sand those runners and detail the sled, even though they gain no actual benefit from doing so. “When I see my sled for the first time on race day, it’s at the line, which means three other people took it upon themselves to recognize the common goal, and prep and move my sled,” Love said.
The sanding parties are the heart of that camaraderie, and even when they feel silly with exhaustion, they all show up for each other. “Our sport is this blue collar sport, where you don’t get a whole lot of recognition,” Love said. “So, you really have to love the sport, and love who you’re doing it with.”
Like all athletes, Love and her teammates are chasing results, and ulitmately, Olympic hardware. But it’s blasting Linkin Park, and Adele, and Sexyy Red, and eating gummy bears that Love expects to remember as her core memories when she looks back on her career.