Below: The supersled,
nearing completion,
looking sleek and mean.

206    world’s fastest sled

metal runners was an expensive piece of kit to

be admired, but that was often all you could do

with it, because they didn’t always go as well

as the bin-liners or plastic sheets, especially in

deep snow. You could get up a fair speed going

downhill on a plastic sheet, and that was always

the appeal, especially to adrenalin junkies like

me. You could be moving fast and, if you hit

a bump you couldn’t see or leaned the wrong

way, you would end up tumbling down the

slope tail over tip. A bit of speed and a bit of

risk, all pretty much for free courtesy of Mother

Nature. It doesn’t get much better than that for

a young lad, does it?

Watching kids playing in the snow on those

new plastic jobs last winter, I could see that

some of them were getting up a good head

of steam. That set me wondering why the

fancy wooden toboggans didn’t always run

so well and, then, just how fast can a sled go

anyway? Was there a record speed, and was it

something that we could maybe have a go at?

I wasn’t thinking about an Olympic record for

something like a bobsleigh with a team of lads,

or lasses, who had trained for years. What I was

thinking of was a sled on an open slope, going

as fast as it possibly could. Surely somebody

must have done it – and it turned out

somebody had …

According to Guinness World Records, a

German called Rolf Allerdissen took what they

called a ‘gravity powered snow sled’ to just over

62 mph (about 100 km/h) on a slope in Austria

in April 2010. To me that didn’t sound very fast

at all, and the sniff of a record was enough to set

the snowball rolling.