A stopwatch clocks an elite luge run between 40 and 50 seconds. Chesterfield’s Dana Kellogg pegs it closer to 10.
“It flies by, it’s so fast. That feeling, I’ve yet to find anything to top that feeling,” he said. “Every time you sit at those start handles and pull off, it’s instant adrenaline. You could have a good run, you could have a bad run, you still got to the bottom and go, ‘wow, that was awesome.’”
Kellogg, an 18-year-old Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School graduate, gets his fix on the USA Luge Junior National team. Luge is an Olympic sliding sport that involves traversing an ice track feet-first on a sled. He competes in the doubles event with Duncan Segger, of Lake Placid, New York, on the Junior World Cup circuit. They shared the 2018 USA Luge Junior Male Athlete of the Year award at a banquet in October.
“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you what I’d be doing without this. There’s nothing else major that I had that took up this much of my life beforehand,” Kellogg said. “Before luge, I hadn’t found anything that I was this extremely passionate about.”
The passion began in Queens, New York, of all places. Kellogg’s mother, Leslie, took him to a USA Luge Slider Search event at a park in the summer of 2013 after seeing a luge exhibition at the All-American Soapbox Derby. Dana Kellogg raced soapbox derby cars before trying luge in Queens.
“It’s a fun thing to do for a day,” Dana Kellogg said.
It turned into much more. The slider search is USA Luge’s official nationwide recruitment tour, focused on athletes ages 9 to 13. Kellogg was on the higher end of that range when he tested luge sleds on wheels down hills and obstacle courses in Queens.
Later that fall, Kellogg received an email. He was one of 80 recruits selected to attend a screening camp in Lake Placid that winter. There, at the site of the 1980 Winter Olympics, he slid on ice for the first time.
After returning the next year for another camp, USA Luge named Kellogg to its Junior National Candidate team in 2014. He skipped the Junior Development Team, the lowest rung.
“They were cutting kids out of the program the entire time,” Kellogg said.
He’s since moved up to the Junior National Team, one step below the Senior National Team that produces Olympic athletes.
Kellogg and Segger began sliding together in the 2016-17 season. They were the overall Youth World Cup winners based on results accumulated over that year. Kellogg is the “top man” and lays on Segger the “bottom man” on the sled. They work together to steer and guide the sled down the track while traveling at around 70 mph.
“I can’t really see. We both share the steering, but I do the harder drives, and he’ll do the little corrections,” Segger said. “It’s basically 100 percent trust. It’s such a dangerous sport. We’re going very fast.”
Kellogg and Segger bunk together often when luge takes them across the country and world. They play video games and golf when they can. The next major international competition is the 34th FIL Junior World championships, Feb. 1-2 in Innsbruck, Austria.
“The more runs we take, the more I learn about his sliding style,” Segger said. “He’s really teachable. We’re open for trying new lines on the sled and new things.”
The sport requires manic attention to minutiae. Fractions of seconds separate Olympic gold medalists from the field. Kellogg didn’t appreciate the details at first.
“When I first started it was hard for me to switch my mindset and get into that super nitpick, analyze the crap out of everything and figure out what went wrong even if it wasn’t a bad run at all,” Kellogg said. “With time you can learn to find things that you’re doing wrong even if you didn’t know you were doing them wrong before. It just takes a lot of time to realize that.”
Kellogg lives in Lake Placid nearly full time. He has a room at the Olympic Training Center with access to its gyms and cafeteria. Much of his funding comes from the U.S. Olympic Committee based on Olympic potential, but he also hosts fundraisers and accepts donations through Venmo.
“There’s not very many luge doubles teams as of now, so my Olympic potential is pretty high,” Kellogg said.
Robert Fegg took over as USA Luge’s Junior National Team coach in April with a focus on remodeling youth development. Kellogg latched onto his new approach.
“He was very coachable. We wanted to change things, and he took it very seriously,” Fegg said. “He’s very interested in technology, what the sled is all about.”
The next Winter Olympics will take place in February 2022. Fegg sees Kellogg on that team in Beijing.
“That would have to be the goal, to go to the Olympics in Beijing,” Fegg said. “I see him going there if everything goes well. In 2026, though, wherever those games are held, if everything goes well, they will be his prime-time games.”
Kellogg is surrounded by mentors and role models. All of the senior team members train and live at the same facility he does. Occasionally, he’ll let it all sink in.
“There’s times we’ll all be sitting around in the cafeteria and I’ll be surrounded by Olympians and Olympic medalists and I’m just the new kid there trying to eat my dinner. It can be kind of intimidating,” Kellogg said. “I definitely am grateful for it. I’m extremely grateful to be able to do this.”
Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @kylegrbwsk.