A New Sport
Winter Olympics, Drones
“Good evening, and welcome to Milano Cortina! I’m Dave Kessler alongside two-time gold medalist Anja Berglund, and tonight, folks, we are in for a treat.”
“That’s right, Dave. The conditions on the Sliding Center track are absolutely pristine. Minus four Celsius, a light dusting of snow cleared just twenty minutes ago, and a surface that the technical team is calling the fastest they’ve seen since PyeongChang.”
“Now Anja, for viewers just joining us, let’s set the stage. We’ve got three teams left in tonight’s final round, and the tension here is incredible. The Americans, the French, and the Italians, all separated by fractions. Fractions, Anja.”
“Fractions, Dave.”
The camera swept wide over the Cortina valley, the Alpine peaks bruised purple against the floodlit track that wound through them like a scar of polished glass. In the starting house, Briggs and Calloway of the American doubles team were already settling onto their sled, Briggs rolling his neck, Calloway pulling his visor down with the calm of a man who’d done this four hundred times and hated it every single time.
Forty meters behind them, crouched on a launching rail that hummed with a faint electric whine, a DJI Phantom X9 racing drone the size of a housecat locked its four rotors into pre-launch position. Its operator, a twenty-six-year-old from Dayton, Ohio named Marcus Webb, sat in a climate-controlled booth overlooking the start, his fingers resting on a dual-stick controller, his eyes fixed on a monitor that showed the track from the drone’s nose camera in crystalline 8K.
“And they’re off!”
The sled dropped. The drone dropped with it.
“Beautiful start from the Americans, clean entry into curve one, and look at that line, Anja. That is textbook.”
“It really is, Dave. You can see the commitment through the Kreisel sequence. No hesitation. Total trust in the equipment, total trust in the hands. This is someone who has spent years learning every centimeter of this track.”
Marcus barely breathed. The drone screamed through curve three at a hundred and twelve kilometers per hour, tilting nearly perpendicular to the ice, its stabilization gimbal making micro-corrections faster than his conscious mind could process. He held the sticks with the lightest possible grip. The coaching staff called it “whispering.” You didn’t fly a drone down a luge track. You suggested directions and prayed.
Below him, impossibly, the sled was pulling away.
“A little wide on curve nine, and that’s going to cost them.”
“Agreed. You can recover from that, but it’s not what you want to see at this level.”
The Americans finished. The clock flashed. The crowd offered polite, noncommittal applause.
Then the French.
Dubois and Marchand rode low, aggressive, their sled chattering against the ice with a sound like tearing silk. The French drone operator, Celine Arquette, flew a different philosophy than Marcus: where he whispered, she attacked, keeping her drone so close to the sled that the downwash from its rotors occasionally brushed the competitors’ helmets. It was reckless. It was gorgeous television.
“Now that is confidence, Dave. She came into curve six at an angle that would have been disqualified two years ago.”
“The rules have evolved, Anja. The judges want to see artistry now. Technical precision is the baseline; what separates gold from silver is whether you can make the audience forget they’re watching a sport and believe they’re watching a miracle.”
“Beautifully put.”
“I’ve been workshopping that one.”
The French finished. The clock flashed again. Celine pulled off her headset and exhaled for what felt like the first time in fifty-three seconds.
Finally, the Italians. The home crowd surged to its feet. Rossi and Bianchi launched to a deafening roar, and behind them, the Italian drone, piloted by Alessandro Ferretti, rose from its rail like something born from the track itself. Ferretti was the veteran. Three Games. Two medals. He did not whisper, and he did not attack. He simply knew.
“Oh, that is special. That is special, Anja.”
“I have chills, Dave. Literal chills, and it is not the weather.”
The sled crossed the line. The drone crossed with it, pulling up in a perfect vertical arc that the slow-motion replay would later show missed the overhead rigging by exactly nine centimeters.
The scores appeared on the board.
“And there it is, ladies and gentlemen! Your gold medal: Alessandro Ferretti, Italy! Silver to Celine Arquette of France, and the bronze goes to Marcus Webb of the United States!”
“A stunning result in the Drone Luge Pursuit, Dave. The first year this event has been included in the Winter Games, and honestly, I don’t think anyone is going to be talking about the sleds tomorrow.”
“No, they are not. They are going to be talking about what we just witnessed: the birth of a new Olympic tradition.”
In the athlete’s booth, Marcus Webb set down his controller, leaned back, and laughed. Bronze wasn’t gold. But God, what a ride.