updated 2:43 p.m. ET Feb. 17, 2006

CESANA, Italy - Over the years, they’ve safely traversed luge courses around the globe, winning a pile of medals along the way. On a perilous Olympic track they couldn’t master, Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin crashed.

Their run for the gold ended short of the finish line — an unexpected tangle of arms, legs and tears.

Seeking the one medal that has eluded them, Grimmette and Martin wrecked on their first run Wednesday, ending perhaps the final chase for the most decorated doubles luge team in U.S. history.

“Brian and I worked hard. We worked hard together,” whispered Grimmette, his voice strangled by emotion. “When you’re on the track sliding, you don’t want to disappoint your partner ... .”

Like the ill-fated slide, which ended with the pair and their capsized sled careening along the base of turn 14, Grimmette couldn’t finish his thought. Unable to compose himself any longer, he broke down crying.

Martin, too, choked up as he recalled the unexpected spill by one of the world’s premier sliding tandems.

“You want to do your best, but that’s why we race, to see how well we do,” he said. “It’s a tough thing to come up on the wrong side of the line, and stop short. But that’s what happens some days.”

Austrians win gold
Austrian brothers Andreas and Wolfgang Linger won the gold in doubles, finishing the two-run event in 1 minute, 34.497 seconds. Germany’s Andre Florschuetz and Torsten Wustlich won the silver, and Italy got its second luge medal of the Turin Games as Gerhard Plankensteiner and Oswald Haselrieder took bronze.

Grimmette and Martin’s crash wasn’t the most serious on a day when the 19-curve course which snakes its way down toward the ski resort of Cesana claimed a few more unlucky lugers. The Ukranian team of Oleg Zherebetskyy and Roman Yazvinskyy — the final duo of the first heat — smashed into an upper wall near the bottom and flipped, briefly sending the pair airborne.

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The impact severed the front right runner of their sled, which had to be carried to the finish by one of their coaches. While Yazvinskyy’s head was immobilized and he was strapped to a backboard and loaded into an ambulance, Zherebetskyy collected himself on a barrier wall, his head in his hands.

Yazvinskyy was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Pinerolo with an unspecified head injury.

Earlier in the games, the tricky, challenging track — modified last year for safety reasons after several sledders were seriously hurt in a test event — got the better of Italy’s Anastasia Oberstolz-Antonova, whose medal chances ended with a crash on her first run.

Another medal contender, Austria’s Sonja Manzenreiter, also got thrown from her sled. And American Samantha Retrosi was hospitalized with a concussion and needed stitches to close a cut chin when the 19-year-old bashed into the top of the wall in the course’s challenging bottom section.

There were other spills and near-spills as athletes struggled to find the proper lines for speed and safety.

On behalf of all nations, the U.S. luge team, aware of possible safety risks, had asked for additional training time. However, its requests were denied by Italian officials.

“This is no sour grapes,” said U.S. luge spokesman Jon Lundin. “This goes back months. This goes back well before the Olympic Games. Our fear was you’d see accidents, you’d see the more skilled athletes having crashes and lesser skilled athletes in a position where they could be hurt.

“We filed and went through the proper channels and were rejected.”

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In 1998 at the Nagano Games, Grimmette and Martin won a bronze to become the first Americans to win an Olympic medal. Four years later, they took the silver at Salt Lake City and spent nearly every day since training for Turin.

Despite a crash during a practice run a few days ago, they started well, paddling hard through the starting chute and toward the first curve. As they made their way down, their split times were among the top five sleds when a mistake entering 14 — named Chaberton after the mountain that towers over the area — ended their quest.

“That run, up until the point where we had problems, was probably one of the better runs we’d had all week,” Grimmette said. “The mistake was that I needed to bring us in a little earlier into 14, but we drifted too late.”

Potential for 2010
Tumbling together through the turn, the pair slid for several seconds before finally coming to a stop. As the teammates for 10 years got up and brushed themselves off, they shared a few words.

Asked what those were, Martin again struggled.

“I asked Mark if he was all right,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “That’s most important.”

Later, the pair received emotional hugs from some of their teammates on a U.S. luge team that came to Italy with big dreams but will leave with only memories — not medals.

Before walking away, Martin said it was too early to decide if he and Grimmette will make another for gold at Vancouver in 2010. They’ve already established a legacy, one that includes 61 international medals, three World Cup titles and one stunning crash.

“I’m very proud of what I’ve done,” Martin said. “It’s an honor to be here.”

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