World Gravity-Powered Snow
Sled Speed Record
Current record: 62 mph
Record holder: Rolf Allerdissen
Nationality: German
Record set: 2010
The Challenge
‘The sniff of a record was enough to set the
snowball rolling.’
NOW. You either love it or hate it, I suppose. For some it means
chaos on the roads, trains that fail to appear, childcare nightmares
when the kids are sent home from school or, worse than mere
inconvenience, livestock perishing on isolated farms or elderly relatives
trapped in their homes, struggling to cope alone. If that’s what snow
means to you, then how could you possibly love it? On the other hand,
when you throw back the curtains at first light and look out on a bright,
fresh, clean world with a blanket of sparkling white snow covering
everything in sight, it’s difficult not to feel the same thrill that we all did
when we were kids – snow is fun! When the weather got colder and the
grown-ups started grumbling about snow being on the way, we would be
waiting excitedly for the first flakes of snow to fall.
S
It might not be so much fun for grown-ups, but when you see kids running
up the nearest hill and hurtling down on sledges of all shapes and sizes,
you can’t help but smile. When I was a lad we used to make do with a
black bin-liner that we sat on and there were plenty of little home-made
sleds out on the hill whenever it snowed. A proper wooden toboggan with
90 MPH Amy Williams’s skeleton bob speed ►
30MPH Guy’s speed indoors on the prototype sled ►
◄10 MPH
62 MPH World snow sled speed record ►
80 MPH Fastest speed on the Cresta Run ►
THE CHALLENGE 205