“a pretty blonde competitor is sporting a black left eye”

 

Sheila Johansen just wanted to spend a little of her free time outside of college classes in the famous Lolo Hot Springs of Montana. While her University of Montana classmates went skiing on the weekends, Sheila found another way to enjoy the outdoors that wasn’t so expensive: luging. Lolo had the only run in the United States at the time and luging gave Sheila and her friend/roommate Ellen free access to the hot springs. It was through this serendipitous and thrifty practice that Sheila found herself, a short time later, at the Winter Olympic Games of 1968 in Grenoble, France.

 

“What a deal!” she said about it.

 

A few months back, my mother casually mentioned to me that “Sheila from book group” had been a participant in the Winter Olympics of 1968 on the first US women’s luge team. I knew Sheila from a young age when she would come to our house on book group nights to discuss the latest reading with my mom and the rest of the book club women. She was always warm, thoughtful, and unassuming, not the former-Olympian archetype. As you can imagine, I was surprised to learn that she had represented the United States and competed at the Olympic level. Furthermore, Sheila’s Olympic debut came at a time of gender integration within the sport and the Olympics worldwide.

(sheila appears here in the middle of the two, front row men)

 

As Sheila tells it: “The first time they had the luge in the Olympics was ‘64. There was one American woman in ‘64 but we were told that she refused to go down the run when she saw it.” Sheila, her friend Ellen, and Kathy Roberts represented the women of the US Luge Team competing against other women lugers from around the world. For the most part, they were accepted by the other men on the US team. “We all got along really well.” However, the media wasn’t as kind. Sheila and her teammates were mostly referred to with some reference to their appearance. Sheila remembers: “We were ‘the girls’. They talked about our size and stuff compared to the guys. They didn’t have high expectations of us at all. They were amazed that we did as well as we did.”

This whole luging thing started when Ellen dragged Sheila to the luge club (at the University of Montana) to vote Joe McDonald president. “[Ellen] had a crush on him. And that’s how I got started. I mean it was just like that.” But when it came time for the Olympics, “Joe didn’t get to go.”

 

Talk of heading to the Olympics as a luge team “happened so fast”, Sheila remembers. “It was a chance to go to Europe. I mean, yeah, I’ll throw myself down a mountain if I get to go to Europe on someone else’s dime.” Even the opening ceremonies flew by. “We walked in, we walked out.” The luge team did not even get to stay for the closing ceremonies.

 

Sheila hasn’t been back to Grenoble since ‘68 - she hasn’t even been luging since. But she remembers the sensation: “Some of those turns would just throw your head back because of the g-force.” Sheila even demonstrated the proper luge position for me with her toes pointed, arms by her sides, and body straight. She’s excited that luging has become a more popular sport for competition and viewership in the US. Sheila says it’s “because the US has started winning some medals.” She is still a huge fan of the sport and likes to watch the event at the Winter Olympics. “I was so excited that there was more of them on this year and you didn’t have to subscribe to a Canadian TV station to see them.”

 

Sheila’s humble recollection of a radical moment of gender integration and personal triumph was a joy to hear. She brought me some of her physical artifacts kept from the games including an Olympic ID card, picture scrapbook, official ‘68 Olympics roster, and a map of her Olympic luge run. In a news clipping she saved, Sheila was described as “a pretty blonde competitor sporting a black left eye”. The image stuck with me as I envisioned the Olympic commentators confronting a fearless and skilled woman luger marked by fierce competition. I find their limited imagination and vocabulary both amusing and disappointing. But, overall, Sheila’s story is a positive one that she remembers with a smile on her face.

 

I knew very little about luging before our conversation but Sheila told me how you start a run: “You don’t start at the top. You start part-way down. You get used to that. Then you keep moving up, moving up, moving up.”