Winter Sports: Odd couple in backs-to-the-ice wall job

Being in Salt Lake is glory enough. Alan Hubbard talks to Britain's lords of the luge

As Britain's Winter Olym-pians warmed up for what is hoped to be the most successful Games for more than 60 years, with six teams or individuals in what the British Olympic Association term the "medal zone" – three with excellent chances – two likely lads were missing from the parade at Alexandra Palace last week. It also happens that they are in the unlikeliest event of all, the luge.

Mark Hatton and Andy Croucher are hoping to be Britain's joint representatives in what is generally viewed in these shores as the oddest of wintry pursuits. Fittingly, both are currently on active service overseas in pursuit of their Olympic objective, which barring miracle or mishap won't bring Britain close to a medal or even close to the medal zone in Salt Lake City.

But just being there will be an achievement in itself for this oddly contrasting couple. Croucher, 27, is an Army sergeant, clean-cut and pragmatic; the more charismatic Hatton, 28, would resist the term "one-time playboy", but he has flirted with a number of colourful activities, includ-ing running what he terms an "adult" nightclub in Tokyo.

The luge, that high-speed form of tobogganing, has always attracted those with a streak of wackiness in their soul. "I've lost count of the number of times people have said to me, 'You must be crazy to do that'," says Londoner Hatton. "Well, maybe we are. But when you get to the bottom of the run in one piece, sit up and look around, the sense of exhilaration is hard to describe."

Lugers, of course, do it feet first on their backs; some of them even do it on top of each other, though not the Brits. Those rubber-clad images which suggest that the double luge is an activity strictly for consenting adults may draw the odd snigger, but Hatton and Croucher point out that it is not that they are bashful, they simply feel their talents are best displayed individually.

An Olympic double act may be a little advanced for a nation not as well versed as the Germans, Italians and the Austrians in the art of slithering, literally flat out, down a refrigerated tube.

According to its practitioners, the luge is the most exacting, exciting and dangerous thing you can do in under a minute on a slippery slope, for you can't actually see where you are going. Steering the 22kg sled requires only the slightest movement of the legs and shoulders, together with split-second decision- taking. Lift your head and disaster is around the next bend.

Hatton, a former Wasps rugby winger who also won Blues in ice hockey and athletics (as a pole-vaulter) at Cambridge, has already qualified for Salt Lake City.

Wrexham-born Croucher is nearly there, though time is running out. He is close to the qualifying mark and has three more opportunities to achieve it this month. He believes his determination will get him through.

He says that when he took up the luge six years ago after a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, he remembered standing at the top of the run and thinking: "I will never be able to do that."

"But that's part of the challenge in luge," he says. "You see things you think you can't do and 12 months later you're doing it."

Hatton, too, says he gulped a bit when he committed himself to the sport in 1993. "I first saw it on TV during the Olympics while I was at university and thought, 'That looks mental', and it is, and physical too.

"The popular view is all that it takes is guts, but there's a lot of technique involved, you're working and steering all the time. It's one of those sports that if you're doing it well it doesn't look like you are doing very much, it seems as if you're just lying there."

Lying back and thinking of Britain and a place in the top 15 of the 36-strong Olympic field, in Hatton's case. He says: "Realistically both of us know there's no chance of a medal, but neither of us want to go there to make up the numbers."

Like its big brother, the bobsleigh, and new sister, the skeleton (in both of which Britain have achieved Olympic or world gold medals), it is a sport of dangerous curves. The British team manager, Mark Armstrong, a colonel who is Croucher's military boss (and the man who enticed him into the event), explains that while many think that going down headfirst on the skeleton is more dangerous, in reality it isn't.

"This is, actually, because in the skeleton you are dragging your limbs behind you and the sides of the sledge give you a lot of protection. In the luge your limbs are out in front and it is more about aerodynamics. The only thing you wear for protection is the helmet. Everything else is designed for speed."

Croucher says he had only been on a sled for seven weeks before he was in the World Championships. "People like the Germans see the Brits beating the crap out of themselves to qualify and shake their heads in admiration."

Both Hatton and Croucher have been training at the superbly equipped base in Calgary which the British team will use before moving down to Salt Lake City. There the Olympic track, the lugers say, is the fastest in the world, where you skim down on at up to a gravity-defying 90mph. A daunting prospect for Britain's intrepid ice-men, but they reckon they will be up for it and hope that the G-Force will be with them.