USA Luge athlete Zack DiGregorio (Provided photo — USA Luge)

LAKE PLACID — The U.S. luge team has sent athletes for two doubles sleds every year since the sport debuted on the Olympic roster in 1964 at Innsbruck, Austria — except 1968 and 2022, when they sent only one sled.

This year, that sled is being occupied by Olympic newcomers Sean Hollander, of Lake Placid, and Zack DiGregorio, of Medway, Massachusetts.

Hollander told reporters in a Jan. 13 video call that he just wants to live in the moment and enjoy it.

“It was definitely a crazy moment at the time, now, it’s stayed very crazy to me,” DiGregorio told reporters on Jan. 13. “It’s been a really cool experience so far.”

“That excitement from qualifying has just continued to grow and grow,” he added. “Until now it’s going to keep going that way hopefully until the games.”

USA Luge athlete Sean Hollander (Provided photo — USA Luge)

DiGregorio and Hollander weren’t expected to earn the Olympic nomination — at least not yet.

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Discovering Luge

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While growing up in Lake Placid, Hollander, 21, started sliding when he was 10 years old during an after-school program.

He said he was able to take a couple of runs out on the track and two of his three siblings slid for a couple of weeks.

He was the only one who stuck with the sport.

While continuing to luge, Hollander became a member of the Adirondack Luge Club before receiving a call that he made the USA Luge development team about a year later.

As a singles slider, Hollander was dominant. In 2019, he won the Norton Junior National Championship and the year prior, he won both the Norton Spring Seeding Races and the Youth National Championship.

“If I wasn’t from Lake Placid I don’t even know if I’d be on this journey,” Hollander said. “I’m very grateful for that. Having a track in Lake Placid, USA Luge being based out of Lake Placid, we’re all very pivotal for me in starting the sport.”

Like many, DiGregorio, 20, first discovered luge through the USA Luge Slider Search program, which took place about 40 minutes away from his hometown.

“The entire day was just competing against my brother more than anyone else,” DiGregorio said. “Then I ended up getting the lucky call and was invited back to Lake Placid.”

One day of competing against his brother turned into the beginning of his luge career. In 2019, DiGregorio proved that USA Luge made the right choice when he won a silver medal at a junior world cup singles race at Altenburg, Germany.

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Doubling up

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While their individual success started to rise, the pandemic happened and USA Luge decided to take a smaller team on the World Cup circuit.

With the Olympics in mind, the duo decided the best way to make the 2022 games would be if they doubled up.

“It’s a really fun story. We always kind of wanted to do doubles with each other but our coaches always told us to focus on singles,” Hollander said.

“It was less the coaches than it was me who was really against either one of them really doing doubles,” USA Luge head coach Robert Fegg said. “Those were my hopes when I was a junior head coach for the next quad in singles. Now looking back, I’m really glad that they convinced me to try it and give it a shot because that seems to be working out really well.”

Now, this first-year doubles team — that’s been training together for the past 18 months — will get another shot at the Olympics.

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Qualifying

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DiGregorio and Hollander secured their first Olympic berth by placing eighth in the Nations Cup in Sigulda, Latvia on Jan. 7. The pair finished just ahead of fellow Americans Dana Kellogg and Duncan Segger in ninth. The difference between the two doubles team was just 0.069 seconds.

Despite the United States not having a doubles team that achieved an Olympic tier qualifying status prior to the Nations Cup race, most would have expected the doubles team of Chris Mazdzer and Jayson Terdiman to take that spot.

But they didn’t.

The team of Mazdzer and Terdiman, who have a combined six Olympic appearances, crashed out of a World Cup qualifying race, ending their hopes of being the doubles sled that represents USA Luge at Beijing.

“The run in Sigulda, looking back at it now knowing that that was more than likely my last competitive run, it’s heartbreaking to be completely honest,” Terdiman told reporters on Jan. 13. “We’ve had this vision, this dream for the entire quad since Chris and I jumped back on the sled together. It obviously wasn’t meant to be.”

Mazdzer is in China to compete in men’s singles.

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Passing the torch

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For DiGregorio and Hollander, the Jan. 7 race meant that they were the top American doubles team. For Terdiman, it meant his luge career was over.

Instead of passing the torch to the youngsters, Terdiman gave them something better — his sled.

Terdiman’s sled is faster than the sled DiGregorio and Hollander were using, so the pair took it. Having never used the sled, Hollander and DiGregorio had to make adjustments to it so it could properly fit them. They also had to train on it.

After officially qualifying for the Olympics, DiGregorio, Hollander, Terdiman and Fegg left Latvia to train in Park City, Utah before heading to Beijing.

“It’s wild how beautifully they fit on it, which I think is very important,” Terdiman said. “We’ve made a couple adjustments to a few parts of it. Things really seem to be really falling in place the way we would hope it would.

“That’s usually not the way things roll when you’re putting together a luge sled,” he added. “It’s working out so well that it feels like to me that it was meant to be.”

While both, DiGregorio and Hollander have already left for the Olympics a piece of Terdiman’s luge career will be with them.

Not only will the duo compete in the doubles luge event on Feb. 9 at 7 a.m. in the United States, but they will also compete in the team relay on Feb. 10 at 8 a.m.

“It’s a really crazy experience. I think it only just fuels us more to want to use these next two weeks to just get as many runs on the sled as we can and just get as good as we can,” Hollander said. “We know that is a very real opportunity and we want to take advantage of that.”