By Brandon HENSLEY

A local teenager is progressing in the wild sport of luge. Michael O’Gara, a sophomore at Clark Magnet High School, was recently invited to join the junior doubles team for Team USA Luge, after a solid showing as a single rider.
O’Gara has spent the past couple of years splitting his time between Park City, Utah and Lake Placid, New York, where he has been honing his skills screaming down icy tracks in hopes that maybe one day the Olympics will come calling.
“If I do keep going on in the sport and keep training we would probably go to the national team in a year or two,” he said. “Probably two years, and then hopefully the Olympics in 2022.”
While that may still be a way off, O’Gara became interested in luge because of the Winter Olympics. Kate Hanson, a La Cañada product who competed in luge in the 2014 games, held a tryout in town after she came back home. It was there O’Gara became hooked.
Since then, he and several others around town have competed for the C and D teams for USA in Park City and Lake Placid, racing against Americans from all over the country. O’Gara is on the C team, which means he doesn’t get to race internationally just yet.
In January, coaches saw him doing well as a single rider, and invited him to join doubles. O’Gara didn’t have the weight as a single rider to make much impact in the ranking, but he stood out for the way he rode.
“It’s not really as much about time as about skill and going down the track … how well you steer the sled,” he said. “Times didn’t really matter to me. Since I didn’t have enough weight I wouldn’t get as fast a time as others would.”
Together with his partner Luke Voegeli from Wisconsin, they’ve reached top speeds of 65 mph.
“It went well,” he said of his experience the first time. “Usually a team starts off slow, but we picked it up pretty quickly.”
There is a top and bottom man. The top man is able to make minor corrections when going down the track. O’Gara is the bottom man, controlling the steering while going through curves. He can’t see too well, as the top man has to signal for him.
“I enjoy it. I would like to see the track a little more. But it’s fun,” O’Gara said.
This summer, he hopes to attend camps and train indoors rather than on outside tracks, while also improving in weight training.
One of those places he trains, Lake Placid, is isolated and cold, two hours north of Albany. Most well-known for Team USA’s hockey “Miracle on Ice” against Russia in 1981, O’Gara said he enjoys making the trip.
“It’s pretty much all forest and it’s really beautiful,” he said.
Places like Phoenix and Houston don’t compare weather-wise, but O’Gara will be visiting those cities this year as a member of Clark Magnet’s Robotics Team 696 that won the Los Angeles regional competition this month in Long Beach. O’Gara is part of the animation team, which helps show off the robot’s design. The Phoenix trip is set for April 8 and April 9.
O’Gara said he is still deciding between animation or engineering as a career. In the meantime, he is working on his Eagle Scout project, something he said is still up in the air as to whether it can be done this year. He’s planning a food drive for local food banks.
“I know they run low on food at the beginning of summer, so I was planning on sometime during the spring collecting a bunch of food outside grocery stores and bringing it to food banks around the community,” he said.
No matter what group he’s a part of, especially luge, O’Gara doesn’t seem to mind going it alone or being part of a team.
“Singles is all on you,” he said. “I also like being on a team and being able to celebrate a successful run with [a partner] rather than being alone on a sled and appreciating it on my own.”