Summer Britcher has been here before. 

She was the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic luge team at the 2014 Sochi Games and since has become a fixture of the Winter Olympics. Britcher has been through four Olympic build-ups and spent each one trying to align her best runs with the brightest spotlight.

This time around, the luge veteran has shifted her focus.

“I’ve regained that spark of joy of just truly loving competing for competition’s sake,” Britcher said. “I'm not really worried about the external factors.”

She is taking the best of what she has learned from her Olympic experiences and leaving the rest behind. In Sochi, when Britcher was 19 and fighting for a spot on the team, she relished in the hunger and freedom of being an underdog.

“Will I make it? I don't know,” she remembered thinking. “But I was just so in love with competing and the whole process, just so happy to be there.”

Her World Cup success in the leadup to PyeongChang 2018 was a testament to her growth as a competitor, but brought a new level of expectation and pressure along with it. She entered those Olympics as a favorite for the podium, but ultimately finished out of the medals.

“I’m hopefully handling that better this time,” Britcher said. “I’m just a little more grounded.” That grounding practice has become part of her routine – something she rehearses as deliberately as she would her steering technique.

“This season, before every run, I really take a moment and just remind myself that I’m grateful to be there.”

At the beginning of the 2025-2026 season, the relentless competition schedule and incessant pressure had begun to take its toll on Britcher.

“What am I doing?” she thought. “I would much rather be at home, but I love this sport and I really want to be competing. I'm frankly not too happy being on the road for a long time living out of a suitcase. I'm too old for that now.”

What could have been a breaking point became a vital reset.

Britcher decided if she was going to continue competing, it couldn’t just be about chasing a result or a medal. It had to be rooted in something more.

“It has to be because I actually, really enjoy it,” she said. “I always have, but you can lose focus of that sometimes.”

Now, the chance to reach her maximum potential on the track is accompanied by a rush of gratitude, rather than anxiety. Before every run, Britcher relies on something every slider knows well: mind runs. 

“You’re visualizing and trying to feel and imagine the pressures on the track and how you’re going to steer and how you’re going to respond,” she said, “So that it feels more instinctual on the track and you can react quicker.”

Those tense moments at the top of a run used to be occupied by thoughts of what could go wrong. Instead, she thinks, “What an opportunity to enjoy my sport.”

While results are not her main focus heading into the Milan Cortina Olympics, hers are reflecting her new mindset.

Britcher has had a remarkable World Cup season, winning in Park City, Utah in December and Sigulda, Latvia in January. Sigulda was her seventh career World Cup win, cementing a new women’s record for American lugers. She added another podium finish to her increasingly crowded résumé after placing third in Lake Placid, New York in December. She stood atop the World Cup standings after Sigulda earlier this season, but will enter the Olympics ranked fifth behind Austrian and German competitors.

To the casual viewer, luge can look deceptively simple. Athletes lay as still as possible on their sled as they rocket as quickly as possible down down an icy track. That stillness is what makes them elite.

“The more it looks like someone’s not doing anything and the smoother, they’re usually much more skilled,” Britcher said.

Serenity is underpinned by expert control that only can be achieved by decades of practice in a sport built on razor-thin margins and precision. Luge is timed to thousandths of a second and Britcher has experienced just how brutal that can be.

“I’ve missed the podium in a World Cup by four or five thousandths of a second,” she recalled.

Luge offers only one occasion for brute force and it comes at the very beginning.

“The start is our one opportunity to physically propel ourselves and actually build up momentum,” Britcher said. “Then we're working with pressure and gravity and trying to reduce friction down the track to build speed.”

Having a competitive start sets athletes up for a strong time, but years of competition experience has taught her that chasing “the fastest start ever” can backfire and actually result in a slower run. She aims for consistency and an explosive entry rather than attempting to change her approach when the pressure is at its highest.

Unlike other sliding sports, luge typically recruits athletes between the ages of 11 and 14. This gives them ample time to develop their skills, while also normalizing the daunting track before too much fear kicks in. In a sport that requires lugers to race down steep ice at speeds up to 90 miles per hour with minimal protective gear, fear would be a natural response.

“I had no concept that being injured was a possibility or that it could happen to me when I started,” Britcher said of her 11-year-old self. “It wasn't until I took a bad crash, when I was maybe 14, that I realized… but I was in too deep.”

While equipment can be optimized for speed and turns can be perfected, Britcher believes the biggest determinant of greatness in her sport is less tangible.

“A massive, massive part of it is mental,” Britcher said. “I've seen people have the same equipment and all the same skills, but they find this good energy within themselves and they do start competing better. They do start going faster,” she said. “It's still hard to understand where that comes from.”

She not only is looking forward to recapturing the delight in her own sport, but the feeling of international connection that eluded her at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, which were impacted by COVID-19 restrictions.

“That Olympic Movement feeling was really missing in the last Olympics,” she said. “I think it will come back in full force.”

In Cortina, she’s looking forward to trading pins with athletes around the world and sharing the joy of the Olympics with her boyfriend, family and spectators in the stands.

Now that she has rediscovered some of the childhood glee that first sent her careening down the track without a care in the world, Britcher hopes audiences in Italy, and back home, will fall in love with the sport, too.

Her pitch for watching luge is simple: “We’re the fastest sport on the ice.”