Olympia 2018: The inventor of curve nine – Architect Deyle explains his masterpiece

The man, who has Felix Loch’s gold medal on his conscience, is apologizing for raising his hands:”It was heartfelt to me, it hurt my soul,”says Uwe Deyle and continues with a mischievous smile:”But it was actually good for the sport. We want to challenge the athletes too.”

If something goes wrong in the Olympic ice channel of Pyeongchang, then the 57-year-old always knows the reason pretty well. Uwe Deyle is an architect, course architect – the Alpensia Sliding Centre is born of his pen. And also curve nine, that damn crease in the lower part, Deyle came up with.

When tobogganist Felix Loch awarded the almost certain gold medal here at the beginning of the games, Deyle sat in front of the TV and felt with the fallen Olympic champion.”But it was also a confirmation that this task is really tricky,”he says in a conversation with the SID.

For the start of the bobsleigh competitions, Deyle has now travelled from his native Swabia to Pyeongchang for a few days, and unfortunately he can also take on Francesco Friedrich and Co. Of course, the bob has a lot more mass, which is ironing it out a bit better than a toboggan sled, less speed is lost,”says Deyle.

But all in all, the curve nine and the following metres are “a conscious difficulty, which is at the limit of what one can bring” and with that all sleds have problems, big as well as small. Bob national coach Rene Spies calls the curve nine the “executioner” of the track.

And how does the architect explain his mean masterpiece, which looks so inconspicuous to the layman? The difficulty lies in the fact that “the curve has a small radius, thus the athlete gets little pressure on the runners”, and this is exactly what he needs in order to steer:”And the actual pressure point is then only 90 centimeters long. At 36 metres per second, you can calculate how much time the sledders have for their steering movements.”

A very small muscle movement “at the wrong moment can destroy a lot of hope”, says Deyle with real regret in his voice. Felix Loch is proof. In any case, he would like to wish the German Bobs “super runs”, says the architect:”You have to hit it four times, but whoever has the medal in the end has earned it”.