Wendel Suckow

Wendel Suckow

nation

United States

birthday

April 11, 1967

place of birth

Marquette

size

188 cm

Weight

102 kg

Career

discipline

Single seater,
double seater (with Bill Tavares )

Trainer

Wolfgang Schadler

National squad

since 1988

status

resigned

End of career

1998

Medal table

World Cup medals

1 ×

0 ×

Luge World Championships
gold	1993 Calgary	Single seater

Placements in the Luge World Cup

World Cup victories	3 (2 in single, 1 in double)
Overall World Cup ES	4. (93/94)
Overall World Cup DS	10. (90/91)

last change: April 10, 2010

Wendel Suckow (born April 11, 1967 in Marquette , Michigan ) is a former American luge athlete .

Suckow started tobogganing in 1985, quickly rose to the top of the national league and took part in the Winter Olympics for the first time in 1992. Until 1992 he started in both doubles and singles, after which he concentrated on singles, in which he became the first US-American to win the world title in 1993. As one of the favorites, he missed a medal at the 1994 Olympics, but achieved the best Olympic result of an athlete in his country with fifth place. Suckow ended his career with his third Olympic Games in 1998 when he finished sixth. He then began a coaching career in the junior division of the US association and then worked in the logistics industry. In his career, the toboggan from Marquette won three World Cups, two of them in singles and one in doubles with Bill Tavares . This makes Suckow one of six athletes to date who have triumphed in both luge disciplines.

Career

Beginnings and first participation in the Olympics (until 1992)

In his early childhood, Suckow had little contact with winter sports. In retrospect, he remembered that he had never gone skiing or anything like that. For this, he and his brothers built toboggan runs with curves in a ravine behind their house. However, he did not really know the sport of luge, although there was one of the few American toboggan runs in his hometown of Marquette. It was not until 1985 that he visited this track with his scout group and completed his first runs. Several years later, he remembered that the first trip on the track was "unbelievable" and that he immediately discovered his passion for luge. In the same year he reached the first junior title and was on the US team as " Rookie of the Year " (German Rookie of the Year Award, in 1986 he got his country in the B-team). This made the 18-year-old from Marquette one of the few American tobogganists of the time who had not started their career on the Olympic track in Lake Placid .

After Suckow had reached the A-squad in 1988, he established himself in the extended international top in both single and doubles. In the overall ranking of the 1990/91 World Cup , he was fifth in the singles and tenth in the doubles classification, together with his partner Bill Tavares . Suckow and Tavares won a two-seater World Cup race for the first time in the following 1991/92 season - on the home track in Lake Placid - while their teammate Duncan Kennedy was the first US American to triumph in the single-seater and came second in the overall World Cup standings. Even at the 1992 Olympic competitions in Albertville , Suckow was overshadowed by Kennedy, although he achieved good results in twelfth in the singles and ninth in the doubles. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel later wrote in a report that Americans who were interested in luge at all knew Duncan Kennedy, but not Wendel Suckow.

World champion and fifth in the Olympics (1992 to 1994)

In autumn 1992, Suckow decided not to compete in the two-seater anymore in order to concentrate completely on the single-seater competitions. At first this had a negative effect; the American's results worsened, which he himself attributed to increasing boredom. At the turn of the year he changed his mental attitude by using relaxation techniques to calm himself down completely before competitions. He also said to himself that he was just as good as "all these guys who finish first or second". In fact, Suckow's form rose again in the new year 1993 until the season highlight, the World Championships in Calgary . According to his own statement, he felt very self-confident there before the start and with the early start number 5 he immediately set a new course record in the first run with 46.051 seconds. Only the reigning Olympic champion Georg Hackl from Germany could beat this time, who was 0.073 seconds faster. In retrospect, Suckow stated that that too hadn't unsettled him; he was very sure in both rounds. In the second and final run, the American started second to last and showed another good performance with 46.043 seconds. Hackl, who started after him, missed this target by almost 0.2 seconds and thus fell back to second place, behind Suckow, who was the first US-American and only the second non-European (after the Canadian Miroslav Zajonc in 1983) Luge world champion was. At the award ceremony, Hackl and the bronze medalist Wilfried Huber took the new title holder on their shoulders and celebrated with him. In retrospect, Suckow said that the success came as little surprise to him, since a world championship medal was his goal in the summer.

The world championship title, which, as Suckow emphasized, had in no way changed his life, the popularity of luge in the United States increased significantly a year before the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer . The sport also got into the US newspapers when Duncan Kennedy was defeated by German skinheads in a World Cup race in Oberhof in November 1993 after defending his black teammate Robert Pipkins . Suckow had walked back to the hotel with Pipkins and later commented on the incident: “We all wished we had been with him [Duncan Kennedy], but we were told it could have made it worse than it already did was. “Otherwise the Olympic winter was successful for the Americans, especially for Suckow, who won a single-seater World Cup in Winterberg for the first time. This made him the sixth and, to this day, the last tobogganer to triumph in the World Cup in both doubles and singles. Overall, he finished fourth in the World Cup ranking, behind Austrian Markus Prock , who won four of the six races of the season. Before the 1994 Olympic competitions , Suckow was one of the favorites again and said it would not be a big surprise if he won in Lillehammer and became Olympic champion. After a mediocre first run, in which he finished tenth, he improved in each of the three subsequent rounds, but as a final result he was only able to take fifth place, while Georg Hackl defended his title from Albertville. Although this fifth place was the best result of any American in Olympic luge competitions, it was viewed in the media as a rather disappointment.

The last years of his career (1994 to 1998)

In the years that followed, Suckow did not quite build on the international successes of 1993 and 1994, but held his own in the international top and was consistently among the top ten even at major events. He lost his world title in 1995 to the Italian Armin Zöggeler when he was clearly beaten in ninth place. The following year, the American had good chances for a medal in fourth place after the first run, but fell back to seventh place in the second run. In the 1996/97 season, Suckow focused particularly on the pre-Olympic test competition in Nagano , which took place in February 1997 on the Olympic track. On the course, which he particularly valued because of its uniqueness, he trained for a long time and finally also won the World Cup race, leaving the two German Olympic champions Jens Müller and Georg Hackl behind. He later described this race, a year before the Olympic competitions, as one of only two perfect ones he had completed in his career. Ten months later, Suckow qualified for the third time in a row as one of three American tobogganers for the Winter Olympics in Nagano by fulfilling the required standard with fourth place in a qualifying world cup. His roommate and good friend Duncan Kennedy did not succeed, he resigned immediately afterwards, especially since he was diagnosed with a cerebral haemorrhage . Suckow spoke of a "great shock", the departure of his teammate would leave "a great void" in the team. In addition, the now 30-year-old announced his own end of career after the Olympics, in order to then lead young tobogganers from his country to the top of the world.

In February 1998 Suckow denied his last runs at the Olympics in Nagano. After winning the dress rehearsal the year before, he was again traded as a candidate for a medal, especially since he again took the role of number one in the US team after Duncan Kennedy's career ended. As in 1994, there was a lot of pressure on the US tobogganists, as they had not won any Olympic medals up to that point. Suckow himself said before the games that he would try not to think about his chances of a podium finish, even if he did not always succeed. In the Olympic competitions, the toboggan from Marquette showed four consistently good runs, but with which he missed the medal ranks and took sixth place. His two team-mates at Olympia, Larry Dolan and Adam Heidt , were eight and ten years younger respectively and did not reach the times of the 30-year-old, while Georg Hackl became Olympic champion for the third time in a row. The US team initially protested against Hackl's success because, in their opinion, the German was not wearing sledding shoes that conformed to the rules. Suckow emphasized that this - ultimately unsuccessful - protest came from the coaches and not from the athletes; he himself does not concern himself with such things. The first US-American precious metal was secured shortly afterwards by the two-seaters Chris Thorpe and Gordy Sheer , who achieved silver. Thorpe had been Suckow's neighbor in Marquette for a long time and had learned toboggan with him on the same track around the same time.

After the career (from 1998)

After his resignation Wendel Suckow worked (German: from July 1998 as "Development Coach" development coach ) in the US luge national team. At the same time, Duncan Kennedy began his work at the association as a junior coach. While Kennedy failed with a comeback attempt at the beginning of the 1999/2000 season, Suckow said goodbye to tobogganing completely and became an account manager in two logistics companies. For 16 years after 1993, Suckow remained the only American to win a world luge title. Only in 2009 did his compatriot Erin Hamlin catch up, who won the single-seater competition for women.

Private

Wendel Suckow was born the fourth of five siblings, he has two older brothers and one younger and one older sister. His parents own a car shop in Marquette and visited him at several competitions, including the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics. Three weeks after Suckow started luge, he moved to Lake Placid at the age of 18 to train more to be able to. Thirteen years later, immediately after finishing his career in Nagano, he proposed to his girlfriend, who ran a fashion shop in Lake Placid, while still wearing racing clothes.

Suckow was especially friends with his teammates Duncan Kennedy and Chris Thorpe. While Kennedy shared a room with him for a long time in the 1990s, Suckow met Chris Thorpe, who was three years his junior, before he started his career. Thorpe moved to Marquette as a child, where he became Suckow's neighbor and started tobogganing with him. From an early age, both athletes had the goal of competing at the Winter Olympics together, which they achieved in 1992. Even after Suckow's career ended, Thorpe continued his career successfully and won the Olympic bronze medal with his new partner Clay Ives in 2002 , having secured silver in 1998.

successes

World Cup victories

Single seater

Two-seater

No.	date	place	train
1.	77131771775 ♠Jan. 31, 1993	Winterberg!Germany Winterberg	Winterberg bobsleigh run
2.	77288146800 ♠Feb 16, 1997	Nagano!Japan Nagano	Bobsleigh track in Asakawa

No.	date	place	train
1.	77091957075 ♠Jan. 19, 1992	Lake Placid!United States Lake Placid	Olympic bobsleigh track Lake Placid

Web links

John Garrity: Wendel Suckow ( Memento from July 2, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) on sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Released March 1, 1993.
Athlete profile: Wendel Suckow ( Memento from May 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Released February 3, 1998.
Wendel Suckow in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )