Sport: The Witches' Pot

Ever since it was built for the 1932 Olympics, the bobsled run at Lake Placid, N.Y., has been considered the ultimate twist by the world's top bobsledders. Plummeting down through 16 curves, it was tricky, low-banked, and so wide that a slight miscalculation sent a sled careening wildly off course; scores of bobbers have been injured, and two have been killed. For the 1964 Olympics, an Austrian engineer named Paul Aste, 46, a onetime bobber himself, designed a narrower, 13-curve run in the Alpine resort of Igls, just above the Tyrolean capital of Innsbruck. Aste thought it might be a trifle...

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