For Bonny Warner, Racing Downhill Is an Exhilarating Uphill Challenge : Going for the Gold at About 80 M.P.H.

SAN FRANCISCO —  It was 6 o’clock in the morning and Bonny Warner was up, but she hadn’t beaten the chickens. She’s fast, but not that fast. All three of her hens--they had been waiting for that moment--had just heard her footsteps on the floor of her two-room redwood cabin in the hills near Palo Alto.

So even though it was barely light outside, two facts already seemed clear. One was that the chickens were hungry. The other was that, unless you are a chicken, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat Bonny Warner.

Right now, Warner is taking steps, some of them uphill, to make sure that nobody will beat her in the 1988 Winter Olympics at Calgary, where she may be the best chance the U.S. women have for a gold medal in the luge, an event that has been tough sledding for Americans. U.S. athletes haven’t come close to a medal since luge became an Olympic sport in 1964.

But this is the off-season for lugers, who spend the racing season lying flat on their backs on sleds that carry them down icy, elevated tracks at speeds near 80 m.p.h. Luge is a winter sport, this is spring, so Warner is conducting her own training program.

There two major problems to deal with--no ice and no track. No problem, Warner decided. She put wheels on an old luge sled and from the top of a hill near her house, she races it down an asphalt road at about 35 m.p.h.

When it’s lunchtime at her job in downtown San Francisco, Warner doesn’t use it to eat. Instead, she puts on the pair of sneakers she keeps beneath her desk, walks over to California Street and then tries to beat the cable cars in a race uphill.

Who’s winning?

“They are,” Warner said. “But I’m getting closer.”

The license plates on her car read: “USA Luge.” The frame that holds the rear plate says: “It’s a sled. Calgary 88.” That’s getting closer, too.

And for the first time, the U.S. women may be close to an Olympic medal. In March, Warner won a gold medal at the World Cup competition in Lake Placid, N.Y. It was the first and only luge gold medal ever won by the United States. The East Germans, who have Cerstin Schmidt and the strongest team in the world, and the Soviets did not compete at Lake Placid but even so, the gold medal Warner won for the U.S. team represented something of a moral victory.

“We didn’t go from almost there to being there, we went from nowhere to being there,” said Mary Ellen Fletcher, the manager of the U.S. national team. “I can’t tell you what that means to us.”

The U.S. team’s bolt out of nowhere actually began in December, when 18-year-old Cammy Myler’s third-place finish in a World Cup race in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, made her the first U.S. woman ever to win a medal in senior international luge competition.

Warner, who was having sled problems, finished 12th and was consistently behind Myler, but she came back later in the season to post fifth-place finishes at both the World Luge Championships in Igls, Austria, in late January and at the Pre-Olympics in Calgary in late February. Myler finished 11th in those races.

“This year, when I fell down in the rankings, people were saying I was done, over with, over the hill,” said Warner, who recently turned 25. “I knew that I wasn’t. I was so much stronger, trained so much harder. I was so damned determined to prove that I wasn’t washed up.

“The World Championships pretty much came out of nowhere. Nobody really knew. People said it was a fluke. People couldn’t believe that I came out of nowhere. I proved it wasn’t a fluke in Calgary and then the icing on the cake was in Lake Placid. I won by enough to know in my heart that if the East Germans had been there . . . “

Wolfgang Schaedler, the coach of the U.S. national team who lives in Tresanberg, Liechtenstein, said it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if they had been there.

“The Russians, it’s no problem,” he said. “The East Germans, I don’t think the East Germans either because she made a very good race in Lake Placid. She wished to win. I don’t think the other girls could beat her in that race. Maybe only one girl, Cerstin Schmidt, but she is maybe the only one. But Bonny won with hard work. She won with self-motivation.”

Warner said she was motivated, all right, partially because of a love of music.

“I was expected to win a gold medal and I did,” she said. “It was the first time we ever heard the Star Spangled Banner. It was an incredibly special moment.”

So, when the U.S. women put their sleds on the track at the Calgary Olympics, the chance of winning a medal, something that seemed like only a dream a short while ago, may not be such a long one. And if Warner is the one to get it, no one should really be surprised.

“I don’t know how much I can say about her athletic ability,” Fletcher said. “But Bonny has something a lot of people don’t have. She’s got incredible desire. I don’t think anything comes easy to her, but she’s such a hard, hard worker.

“But it’s really her desire. That’s the one thing about her. If I could learn how to take that and put it in the other athletes, we could have medals across the board.”

Of course, it hasn’t hurt being a little bit, well, crazy, either. It’s not everyone who races cable cars at lunchtime, after all.

“She’s a wacko,” Fletcher agreed.

It seems that Warner has always been slightly different, or at least a little bit of a daredevil. She grew up on Mt. Baldy and began skiing when she was 3.

She said her mother put her on skis so she wouldn’t have to look for a baby sitter. By the time Bonny was 4, she was racing adults down ski hills. “I always beat them because I’d go straight down and they would turn,” Warner said. “Of course, I’d end up in a heap at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t know you were supposed to turn to slow yourself down.”

Presumably, Bonny didn’t know either that she shouldn’t skateboard down a hill or ride her 10-speed at 60 m.p.h. down Mt. Baldy, both of which she did regularly.

Mike Warner, Bonny’s father, worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, which could explain why she picked a sport that’s like taking a ride on a jet propelled roller coaster.

“It’s like you’re going on the steepest roller-coaster climb you can find and then making a turn,” she said. “But you’re doing it. It’s not like on a roller coaster (where) you don’t have a choice where you’re going. It’s very much like a roller coaster, but much better because you’re at the controls. Anybody who loves roller coasters would love luges.”

Joy Warner, her mother, said that even when Bonny was very young, setting goals and then reaching them became an important part of her life.

“She beat the kids at school in running and in the classroom,” Joy Warner said. “If you got a sleeping bag as a reward for selling 130 boxes of cookies, she’d sell 135. She won the school’s Christmas costume party when she dressed up as a Christmas tree with lights that turned on and off. She was 12.”

Bonny had her driver’s license at 14, delivered newspapers, was entrusted with planning the family’s vacations and graduated from Ontario Chaffey High School at 17.

“She’s very calculating, very independent, very competitive and very charismatic,” Joy Warner said.

Anything seems possible with Warner, a former Stanford field hockey goalie, who never saw a luge before the 1980 Winter Olympics.

Wanting to become a torch bearer for the Lake Placid Games, she wrote an essay that must have been persuasive. She was among those chosen and ran a total of 87 miles carrying the torch. At the Games, she went to the luge competition.

“I had never even seen a luge before,” she said. “It was an amazing thing to stand there and see people whizzing by at 80 miles an hour 30 feet in the air.”

Warner stayed at Lake Placid for 2 1/2 weeks for a luge clinic. “I got hooked after the first ride,” she said.

“It’s the kind of sport that right away you can tell whether or not you really like it and the coaches can tell whether or not you’re going to be any good five years down the road.

“First of all, if you get on a sled, it separates you from a lot of people because it looks so dangerous and scary and daredevil and all that stuff.

“So you have to have a certain amount of nerve to get on it in the first place. Then, if you can be relaxed while you’re going, then it looks like you might have a chance. And you have to have some of the daredevil side to you. But real wild people don’t do well because they can’t relax.”

Still, those 2 1/2 weeks might have been the end of the luge for Warner had it not been for another contest. She won the grand prize in a nationwide drawing of nearly 2 million people and got $5,000. The contest was called ‘To be the best you can be.’

“I thought, ‘Well, this has got to be an omen,’ ” Warner said.

First, she bought a sled. But since the luge season was over, Warner just told her field hockey coach she’d be taking the next year off and spent the summer working out at the U.S. training center in Squaw Valley.

“It was kind of presumptuous of me, but what the heck?” Warner said.

Warner trained during the day and worked as a security guard at night. “Of course, I didn’t even know what I was training for,” she said.

In August she flew to Europe and worked as a nanny for a German family who lived next to a luge track. She also studied German so she could get better coaching.

Soon after the track opened in October, there were no more beginner groups for Warner to train with, only the West German national team. Warner asked the coach if she could train with them and he agreed.

“If somebody came to you from another country and said, ‘Hi, I’d like to train with you,’ you would assume that they are one of the best in the country, right?” Warner said. “So I guess he assumed I was one of the top Americans. Only I hadn’t even met the top Americans.”

In the next week, she never made it down the course without crashing. Then the West Germans began to coach her in earnest.

“They were really afraid I was going to hurt myself,” Warner said. “I wore soccer shin guards on my elbows, a big helmet, tennis shoes and jogging clothes. I was just a person off the street almost. I think that I might have been an embarrassment or something, so they felt they had to fix this kid up.”

For three months, Warner trained with the West Germans, then when the luge track opened at Lake Placid, she tried out for the 1981 U.S. national team.

“I was No. 3 that year, “ she said. “I just showed up. They didn’t even know who I was.”

They do now, and Warner might have made herself even better known in the 1984 Olympics at Sarajevo. After two runs, she was in eighth place and knew she needed an extremely fast third run to have any chance at all for a medal.

But on that third run, she crashed when she kept her head down and didn’t see the second-to-last turn well enough. She was trying to increase her speed by reducing her wind resistance.

Both Warner and her sled finished the race, but not together. It was still a legal run, but she lost two seconds and wound up 15th. Still, Warner said the gamble had been acceptable in her sport, where less than a second often separates first from 15th.

“In luge, if you want to take a risk, you can,” she said. “If you could do a course with your head completely back, without watching a thing, you’d probably be half a second faster,” Warner said. “But you can’t do it completely blind. So the idea is to do the part you know really well, the long straightaways, with your head back. You can increase the number of places you don’t look if you want to, but it’s a risk.

“If you crash, well, it looks wild and crazy, but it’s pretty controlled. You usually hit your arms and you have pads there. And you just slide like (going down) a really fast slide. It’s not like falling out of a car at 80 miles an hour on asphalt. You might get an ice burn, but that’s all. Ice is smooth.”

Maybe so, but the ride has been bumpy. Warner’s No. 3 world ranking hasn’t been particularly easy to get, especially after her start last fall, when Myler beat her in several World Cup races.

Warner and Myler are not the only women who will be vying for the three spots on the U.S. Olympic team--Erica Terwillegar and Darcie Evans are the others--but they are probably the best right now and the competition between them has been pretty intense.

“Bonny wasn’t the fastest last year, and Bonny was beaten several times in national races, as much as she hates to admit it,” Fletcher said.

Said Warner: “(Myler) came out like ‘Gangbusters.’ She won that first women’s medal at Sarajevo. She’s still young, though, and after that, it sort of got to her. She hasn’t been able to be consistent in her races. When I retire, the person who is going to be the best is Cammy. In the fall, she was beating me, hands over, but that was because of this whole business with the sled.”

The problem with her sled was that it wasn’t going fast enough. While Myler was winning the bronze medal at Sarajevo, Warner was finishing 12th. She finished fifth the year before and was convinced that her sled was faulty.

So, she got Schaedler to overhaul it during the Christmas holidays. Schaedler found that the sled was pulling slightly to the left, which meant that Warner was compensating by steering to the right. Steering slows a sled.

In the second World Cup race, Warner was fifth, her best international finish. Then she was seventh at Oberhof and fifth at the World Luge Championships.

“For me, I had set a goal to finish in the top 10,” Warner said. “If I did that, I figured I had a legitimate chance of winning a medal in the Olympics. That is a dream goal. And I finished fifth.”

After that came her fourth-place finish at the Pre-Olympic event in Calgary, where Warner was only one-tenth of a second behind Schmidt, who won the gold, and following that was the Lake Placid World Cup event, in which she won the gold.

“So now, I’m really pretty psyched,” she said.

The word luge is French for sled. Others have said that luge is French for you should have your head examined. A luge is about four feet long and weighs 48 1/2 pounds. The ones that Schaedler custom-makes would run about $1,500 if you could buy one, which you can’t.

Lugers call themselves sliders and when they ride their sleds down the icy track, the G-forces can reach 4 1/2. But it wasn’t until after the 1984 Summer Olympics that the United States became a force in luge.

Some of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s surplus from the 1984 Los Angeles Games--$1.2 million--trickled down to the U.S. Luge Assn. The association has an annual budget of $500,000, of which $250,000 is spent on the national team.

Never before has the United States been in a position to challenge the East Germans for a luge medal in the Olympics, where the American women’s team may be stronger than the men’s. This is just a little bit of pressure, especially for the top-ranked American named Warner.

“She can handle pressure,” Schaedler said. “She has good nerves. Some other girls have problems with that, but for her, I think it is no problem.”

So how about a medal for the United States . in Calgary?

“We can do very well,” Schaedler said. “Bonny can do very well. She can make a very good race because she has woke up this year.

“When we have a good day and a little bit of luck, we can win a medal. But I cannot say now we will win a medal. We are not the favorite. Maybe it is easier to come from the side and win a medal. It is also hard to make the same jump next year that we did this year. In fact, it’s not possible.”

Maybe not. Then again, who knows? It may be best not to underestimate Warner, who has something she calls dream goals.

“My dream goal is gold and my realistic goal is bronze,” she said. “I really feel a medal is there. A gold is tough with Cerstin Schmidt, but it’s definitely possible, especially if I get a better start, which is what I’m working on.”

In the meantime, there are a few other goals Warner has to think about. She plans to take ballet lessons. She wants to get a pilot’s license. She wants to build her own log cabin. She is also considering taking up sky diving, but probably not hang-gliding, which she considers a little too dangerous.

Warner said she really isn’t the kind of person who takes too many risks.

“I’m not even the kind of person who drives a car fast,” she said. “Seventy m.p.h. is tops.”

The California Highway Patrol is probably relieved to hear that. But there is no speed limit to worry about on the luge track, the place where Warner’s personality really takes off.

“I’m not wild and crazy,” she said. “I’m semi-wild and crazy. I think you have to have a sane streak. That’s why I got into this sport, to convince myself I had a sane streak.”

With that, all of a sudden, a luge medal doesn’t sound so crazy anymore.