Slidensa: Ice, Gravity and Speed

Slidensa
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Short documentaries about the people, physics and machines behind bobsleigh, luge and skeleton — and the work of turning all three into a game.

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Why Is Ice Slippery?

    Almost everyone learns that ice is slippery because pressure melts it under a blade. The numbers say otherwise. This is the story of a question physicists are still arguing about: two brothers and a thermometer in 1849, Faraday's ice blocks that stuck together for a day, a laboratory dug into a glacier in 1938, Scott's sledge on his last march, dragging "like pulling over desert sand", and the latest experiments and simulations that disagree with each other. And why the sliding sports police runner temperature.

  2. 6d ago

    The Hotelier’s Bet

    St. Moritz says Alpine winter tourism began with a hotelier's bet in 1864. The story is first traced almost a century later. This is the story of how winter in the high Alps changed from a season visitors avoided into one they crossed Europe for: a winter stay in 1868 with sunshades on the ice, a doctor in Davos who sold thin air, tuberculosis patients and the limits of the mountain cure, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, electric light, railways and rinks, racing on a frozen lake, and the icemen, drivers and hotel staff who made it all work. Sliding sport grew inside that winter world.

  3. Oct 9

    Feet First

    Bobsleigh and skeleton each have a famous first ride. Luge has none. This is the story of how the sled everyone already knew became an international sport: Viking sleds and the dates nobody can source, a night ride on a horned sled in the Giant Mountains, Innsbruck's sledding boys, students and salt miners, a sled bent from one steel tube, a 1913 newspaper column on why to lie flat, and the first European championship at Reichenberg in 1914, with canvas stretched over the track to keep off the sun. It follows luge into the bobsleigh federation in 1936, in the hope of reaching the Olympics, and back out again when the lugers founded their own federation in 1957.

  4. Oct 7

    Why Slidensa?

    A 1987 computer game whose rivals got faster every time you improved, and a group of twelve-year-olds with a dictionary who beat it as a team. One of them promised himself he would one day make a better, fairer game. This is the story of the game that gives this series its name: why a game born from a bobsleigh game holds bobsleigh, luge and skeleton; how its physics lets a sled find its own line on the wall; why every run is recorded so it can be replayed and checked; how it came to be called Slidensa; and why the spirit it aims for belongs to one of the oldest sliding clubs in the world, on the Cresta Run in St. Moritz.

  5. Oct 5

    Head First

    In February 1887, a rider on the Cresta Run in St. Moritz lay down on his sled and went head first. A local newspaper called it "uncanny." He fell more than once, and he did not win. Within four winters, almost every rider in the race went the same way. Origin trilogy, part two. Drawing on the riders' own books from the 1890s, this episode follows everything that changed around that one position: a steel sled named for its bones, a way of steering with body, grooves and raked boots, a run rebuilt by hand every winter, a club that wrote the rules, the women who rode from the start and were shut out in 1929, and the road to the 1928 Winter Olympics.

  6. Oct 4

    How Do You Steer a Sled with No Steering Wheel?

    At 140 kilometres an hour, the movement that decides a run may be too small for a television camera to see: two rings drawn back by a few centimetres, a calf pressed against a runner, a shoulder loaded into a steel frame. The track was going to turn all three sleds anyway. So what is the athlete actually steering? This episode follows the bobsleigh's ropes and its brake that must wait for the finish line, luge sleds that turn by flexing, and skeleton frames with no conventional steering mechanism at all. It meets an Olympic pilot who reached the ropes a moment too late, hears lugers on the new Cortina track, counts the cost of a toe tap, and asks what a simple game control can honestly keep from all of it.

  7. Oct 3

    The Racetrack That Fit in 3 Kilobytes

    In 1987, Digital Integration tried to put an entire bobsleigh season into a ZX Spectrum: real venues, equipment, weather, training, money and an Olympic campaign. It was not the first bobsleigh videogame, but it may have been the earliest to model the organised sport and its real-world circuit with advice from elite competitors. Then there are the tracks. Six of them fit into exactly 2,907 bytes, with no map coordinates at all. This episode follows the game's history, authorship, platforms and reception, then shows how a small table of sines and cosines turns three-byte instructions into complete track plans—and why that elegant compromise still inspires Slidensa today.

  8. Oct 2

    Two Toboggans, a Plank and a Garden Rake

    In 1883, a Swiss postman and an Australian cricketer finished in a dead heat after racing wooden sleds down a public road. A few winters later, someone joined two small sleds with a plank—and, according to one account, used a garden rake as a brake. But who actually invented bobsleigh? Episode one follows rival Alpine towns, competing inventors, a banned machine, a Swiss blacksmith, telephone timing, traffic collisions and the moment the sport became too fast for the road that created it. Explore Slidensa and find episode sources at https://slidensa.com/podcast/

  9. Trailer

    Introducing Slidensa

    Before bobsleigh, luge and skeleton had names, twenty-one people raced wooden sleds down a road in Davos. Meet Slidensa: short documentaries about the history, physics and engineering of sliding sport—and the work of turning all three disciplines into a browser game.

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    8 Episodes

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Short documentaries about the people, physics and machines behind bobsleigh, luge and skeleton — and the work of turning all three into a game.

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