Associated Press
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AUSTIN, Texas ? Like plenty of Austin kids, Jared Orenstein's first experience on ice came at the indoor skating rink at Northcross Mall.

"He was out there seven or eight minutes, one lap, and he was (done)," his mother, Kym, said.

Jared, who was 7 at the time, recalled, "No ice sports for me. It was too cold."

About six years later, however, Jared learned what real cold felt like. Last year he left balmy Austin and flew to New York. The weather in Albany wasn't too bad, but by the time he had taken a two-hour ride to the U.S. Olympic training center in Lake Placid, the temperature had plummeted. The teen was still dressed in his jeans and a shirt, and when he tried to step out of the car, a blast of 20-below-zero air quickly drove him back.

He steeled himself and made a dash for the nearby building, slipping and sliding on the ice and snow in his cowboy boots, too unnerved by the cold to remember to put on the coat that he carried.

At the training center, he became an amusing oddity, a Texan who could barely walk on ice trying to learn the fastest sport on that frozen surface: luge.

"It's kind of like the Jamaican bobsled team," Kym Orenstein said of her son's whirlwind involvement in such an unlikely sport.

It hasn't been all cool runnings for Jared. He withdrew from Canyon Vista Middle School in January, not long after a truant officer came to his house while he was training in New York. Yet he has shown a talent for this bizarre and dangerous winter pursuit, so much so that earlier this month, Jared learned he was one of three males from the United States' junior team selected to begin training year-round in Lake Placid.

"We'll have to buy a new wardrobe," Kym Orenstein said.

As a slider, Jared lies on his back and whips down mountains on the slightest of sleds.

"I'm going faster than a car, and I'm this far off the ground," Jared said, holding his hand a few inches off the floor. "And there's nothing but the gloves and the body suit between me and the ice."

He's already topped 70 mph, but lugers' speeds at the 2010 Winter Olympics could pass 100. Jared, 14, is too young to be sliding at the Vancouver Games, but he is pointing toward the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

"I've got to go and represent," Jared said.

Rather than wait for athletes to come to them, for the past 24 years USA Luge has actively searched for slider candidates nationwide. USA Luge looks for 11- to 14-year-olds, believing that it takes about eight years to master the sport. Two-time Olympic medalist Brian Martin was discovered in such a search, as was current women's world champion Erin Hamlin, along with the majority of other international medal winners for the United States.

The search, overseen by U.S. coaches, uses a street version of luge, with sleds that have wheels instead of runners and a 14-foot-high starting ramp, which is hauled to various towns. Two years ago the Texas stop was near Fort Worth, and Kym Orenstein reasoned, why not go?

The sledding route was on a hilly road in the middle of nowhere, and it ran by a cemetery and an abandoned church. Protective hay bales were placed near a ditch and at the end of the course. The novices were first shown how to make some turns on a flat stretch and then given a chance to use the ramp.

Jared looked at the course skeptically and then asked, "Mom, do you want me to die for U-Haul?"

Kym Orenstein, a traffic control manager, works for U-Haul. So does Jared's father, Bruce, as a facility maintenance technician. They don't have to borrow any trucks to get home or to work. They live across the street from a U-Haul on U.S. 183. And U-Haul happens to be a corporate sponsor of USA Luge, which was how the Orensteins learned about the 2007 tryout in Texas.

Glancing again at the course, though, Jared reasoned, "It's no worse than me going down Yaupon (Drive) on my skateboard."

While other would-be sliders used their feet to try to slow down when they sensed trouble, Jared wasn't about to scuff his Air Jordans that way. After using them to get a good push, he stayed on the sled until something, or somebody, stopped him.

"I don't care if I crash as long as I don't break anything," Jared said.

Coaches noted his lack of fear, which matched his responses on a questionnaire. When asked what other activities he would like to try, Jared checked off things like football, lacrosse, bull riding, sky diving the more dangerous it sounded, the better, he reasoned.

He also did well in some physical tests, such as chin-ups and sit-ups. The coaches then announced that of about 800 athletes tested nationally, only 75 would be picked to go further.

Jared said, "A few months later you either get an acceptance letter to the camp and a big envelope or a little card saying you didn't get accepted."

He was picked to attend a screening camp at Lake Placid to try the training sleds, which are a little easier to steer than the ones used in competition.

Luge, the French word for sled, is a sport that originated in the ski resorts of Europe, and it has been nearly perfected by the Germans, who've dominated the medal counts since luge became an Olympic sport in 1964. A single-person luge weighs 50.6 pounds, and its rider steers it with slight adjustments of the shoulders, head and legs.

Jared said one person in his development camp had a luge track in his backyard, and another prospect came from a family of sliders. While northern states do produce a few athletes like that, luge is an exotic sport there as well. As with the bobsled, competitions are ideally held on refrigerated tracks, and there are only a couple in the U.S., in Park City, Utah, and Lake Placid both sites that have hosted the Olympics.

"The first time I slid in the winter," Jared said, "I did it without a glove, and I hit a wall and sliced my hand open. I'd forgotten my gloves and left them at the bottom of the track. I went down because I didn't think I'd hit a wall, but I did. ... It was like minus-20, so I couldn't feel it even though I was losing a lot of blood."

The gloves, used for paddling on the starts, have spikes sewn onto the fingertips for greater traction at the pull-and-push start.

"If we forget and do high fives, we'll stab each other," Jared said of celebrations after a good run.

The one-piece racing suits are aerodynamic, and the helmets are made of Kevlar. The gear is designed to be as light as possible because of the gravitational forces up to 5 G's that can be exerted on a slider's head.

Although the equipment and the environment were strange to Jared, it didn't show.

"He stood out among them. He just picked it up quicker on the ice," said Pat Anderson, development coach for USA Luge. Jared was the only boy from his screening camp to make the development team, which usually consists of 15 to 25 male and female athletes each year. To remain in the program, the athletes have to periodically pass physical tests.

A commitment to the sport involves more than the time and effort spent in the winter and summer training camps. Development team members don't receive financial help from USA Luge. Kym Orenstein estimated that Jared's expenses, including six training camps, have totaled $18,000 so far, although he gets financial assistance from U-Haul. Now that he's been selected to train year-round, however, USA Luge will pick up most of his expenses.

Jared left for Lake Placid and its indoor training center, with three refrigerated ramps for practicing starts, on June 26 for three weeks. He will return again in September. When training at home, Jared runs, lifts weights, in-line skates and does pull-ups on door ledges.

Jared raced at the national luge championships in Park City in February. There, he kept to his pre-race routine of meticulously working on his runners, or steels as they are called. The runners are so sharp that, if Jared's not careful, they can slice through his racing suit when he carries them on his hip. To get them ready for a race, he'll work on them for five arm-burning, hand-blistering hours, stripping them with acetone and then buffing them with diamond paste and sandpaper until they glisten like mirrors.

"They have to be in perfect condition or you will hit the walls," Jared said.

After hours of sanding, Jared zipped down the Park City course in 1 minute and 28 seconds. His run earned him the gold medal in the Youth B men's national championship for athletes up to age 15.

Things have not gone as smoothly at home for Jared, who would eventually like to join the Marines and, until this week, wanted to attend Westwood High School and join the ROTC program there.

As an eighth-grader at Canyon Vista Middle School, his participation in the Olympic development camps and his 23 missed school days created friction with the administration, so much so that a truant officer was sent to arrest him. Kym Orenstein then withdrew Jared from school to avoid further problems and costly court fines.

Barbara Paris, principal of Canyon Vista, said that such extracurricular activities don't qualify a student for excused absences.

"There's some leeway, but not much," Paris said. "It was the same with Lance Armstrong; schools were not able to excuse him."

In Armstrong's case, he withdrew from Plano East and graduated from a private school in Dallas.

Jared has been accepted at the National Sports Academy in Lake Placid. The private school has an average class size of fewer than 10 pupils, and USA Luge will pay for most of his schooling.

As for his education on the track, Jared said, "I've probably learned one percent of the sport."

But a Texan who was once averse to the cold is now on the fast track in the fastest sport on ice.

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