"We have 10 sleds that are essentially falling apart, showing serious wear and tear, " Holcomb said.
The four-man sleds, which are trickier to control, begin competition on the track on Friday.
Hemlock Hardware in Fairfield did a brisk business on shovels, batteries, firewood, salt, sand and sleds.
Sleds replace prams, dog owners ski instead of walk and young people skate across town to visit friends.
We glissade--make sleds of our backsides--and zip down the hill in no time.
Inuit hunters are finding the sea ice too thin to bear their sleds.
"They're coming in buying shovels, ice melts and sleds, " said Atton Shipman, who works at Back Bay Hardware in Boston.
Finally, we hauled our sleds to the trailhead in the van, pulling a caravan of yelping pups in a trailer behind us.
Mushers and their dogs often don festive regalia at the noncompetitive ceremonial start while also toting warmly bundled "Iditariders" in their sleds.
After disembarking, riders must tow their sleds across several hundred yards of flat terrain until they reach the top of the run.
The top eight sleds in the 33-sled field included two each from Switzerland, Germany, and Canada, and one each from Russia and Latvia.
The Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project refurbished the American team's sleds for two decades, but since the split, few wrenches have been taken to the fleet.
Since reindeer need to be fed less meat than dogs, locals used the antlered animals to pull their skis and sleds from the 14th Century onward.
Today, sleds of visitors are pulled through birch forest in the same way that goods were transported from the summer to winter feeding grounds of the semi-nomadic Sami people.
The 1, 000-mile race kicked off in a festive mood as 66 teams posed with fans and sailed their sleds 11 miles on streets covered with trucked-in snow.
And they now compete in straight-line drags or on an oval course, reaching speeds as high as 75 mph, on sleds that are only slightly modified for racing.
On film, the trips have a regular rhythm: The boarders begin with fresh-faced excitement, packing up their snacks, camp stoves and tents into elaborate parcels, which they drag uphill on sleds.
WSJ: Snowboarder Jeremy Jones's Secret Code of Snow | Creating
Punters can grab one of the few dozen sleds often available at the bottom of the run and either drive or take the lift to the top of the 483m-tall mountain for the slide.
Sleds have been used as transport in the Arctic region for thousands of years and old sleds and leather reins have even been found in bogs, estimated to be more than 3, 000 years old.
He's hopeful he also can raise funds to fabricate a pair of two-man sleds for Sochi, though he admits it's a lot to ask for in such a short span of time.
Loch, from Germany, coasted to victory on the 2010 Olympic track and led a 1-2-3-4 sweep by his country on a night when German sleds took five of six medals in two events.
Bodine, whose involvement in the sport since 1992 has helped transform the United States into a consistent podium contender after decades of mediocrity, has vowed to continue to provide sleds to the U.S. team.
Some say they need to make sure their kitchens are locked during off-hours to prevent drunken raids by brothers with the munchies or in search of large baking sheets that can double as sleds on snowy days.
The Swiss use a variety of sleds, from crude wooden frames that go sideways as fast as they go forward, to low-slung sports models that look like a luge and can be steered by warping the runners.
Here was a universe in which you might imagine Robert Scott and his men with all their equipment in packs and crates being hauled along by dog sleds, with Robert at the fore, battling his way through white-out snow to achieve the mission.
During hundreds of camping trips and meetings and service projects and weird and wonderful events such as the Klondike Derby (a cold-weather competition in which scouts drag makeshift sleds over frozen ground for hours), I learned how to adapt to changing circumstances on the fly while keeping the main goals in sight.
应用推荐