At the Winter Olympics, which get underway next month in Pyeongchang, South Korea, some of the most blistering speeds will come in the three high-adrenaline sliding sports, where top athletes zip on the ice at about 90 miles an hour. There's bobsled, kind of like a downhill race car on steel runners. In the luge, athletes lie back on a sled, going down the track feet first and face up. And then there's skeleton, where racers go head-first, face-down, in a blink-and-you-miss-it blur of speed. What lures athletes to this sport? Katie Uhlaender, one of the top U.S. skeleton athletes — both a World Cup champion and world champion, aiming for her fourth Olympics at age 33 — explains the appeal this way: "It is the perfect combination of meathead and freestyle zen athlete," Uhlaender says. "And," she adds with a grin, "due to my short attention span, it suits me well!" It takes less than a minute for an elite skeleton athlete to race down the mile-long track: 50-some seconds of speed thrills
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