LAKE PLACID, New York — Augusta’s Julia Clukey and the rest of the U.S. women’s luge team are back on home ice for this weekend’s Viessmann World Cup tour stop at the team’s training base on the 1980 Winter Olympics course.
Preparation for the event, the second stop on the World Cup circuit, was scheduled to begin Tuesday. Nations Cup qualifying is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, while doubles and men’s singles competition will be contested Friday at 9:55 a.m. at Mount Van Hoevenberg and women’s singles and the team relay are slated for 9:30 a.m. Saturday.
Clukey, who finished 17th in the 2010 Winter Olympics at Vancouver, British Columbia, and narrowly missed returning to the Sochi Games last winter, is among eight Olympians on the U.S. team. That contingent is led by Sochi Olympic bronze medal winner Erin Hamlin of Remsen, New York.
This will mark the first World Cup stop at Lake Placid since February 2013, when Clukey won the silver medal in the women’s singles competition — a career-best effort for the 29-year-old Cony High School graduate.
The races will air over two hours beginning at 7 p.m. Dec. 16 on the NBC Sports Network. Universal Sports, available on some cable and satellite outlets, will air the races on Dec. 10-11. Check local listings for airtimes.
The world’s top lugers arrived in Lake Placid on Monday after competing in the season’s first World Cup event in Igls, Austria, last weekend.
Hamlin was the top American at that competition, finishing fifth overall on the two-time Olympic course near Innsbruck. She was one of four Americans to place among the top 15 in the women’s field.
Emily Sweeney, the 2013 junior world champion from Suffield, Connecticut, placed a career-best seventh while Clukey was 13th and 2014 Olympian Summer Britcher of Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, was 14th.
Defending Olympic and World Cup champion Natalie Geisenberger won the event with a two-run time of 1 minute, 19.822 seconds to pace Germany’s sweep of the top four positions.
Hamlin was fifth in 1:20.394, while Clukey, who missed qualifying for last year’s Olympic team by 0.013 of a second in the final selection race, was timed in 1:20.651. She had the fastest starts in both heats.
Saturday’s competition was followed by by the inaugural International Luge Federation’s World Cup sprint races on Sunday, also at Igls.
That event, for only the top 15 in the current World Cup standings, uses the normal start elevation for each discipline but the timing does not begin until 100 meters down the course.
Again Geisenberger led Germany to a sweep of the top four places with a time of 31.396 seconds, while Hamlin led American competitors by finishing seventh in 31.706 seconds.
Sweeney placed 12th in 31.852, followed by Clukey (13th in 31.877) and Britcher (14th in 32.982).
