With the winter Olympics coming up I looked into the word bobsled the other day; today luge.

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The bobsled was adapted from the hardworking sleds of lumberjacks.

Luge, on the other hand, seems to have started out as a plaything, this time from Switzerland.

The word luge is said by some dictionaries to be from French and particularly from Savoy which is part of the Alps.

Other dictionaries point to the eastern end of Switzerland and a Latin word for “sled” which, if you peel off the leading “s” from sled becomes more etymologically understandable; sled, sledge, ledge, luge.

The story behind luge as a sport is that in the town of St. Moritz there lived a not so humble hotelier named Caspar Badrutt.

This was in the second half of the 1800s.

Over in England Queen Victoria was on the throne and the British Empire was rolling along nicely.

Hotels in the Alps were doing a booming business with English tourists staying for months on end in the summer. But the winter was a bit of a dead zone.

The story goes that one of Caspar’s rich and influential British guests asked what the locals did all winter in such a hostile environment.

Caspar said that it really wasn’t so bad; in fact there were lots of days when it was so sunny you could wear short sleeves.

The English guest scoffed.

Caspar made the following offer: come back and see; if I’m wrong you can stay at the hotel for free, if I’m right you have to tell all your friends.

Caspar won his bet and St. Moritz quickly became a winter tourism destination.

To keep his guests entertained Caspar set up winter sporting facilities including a luge run said to still be in operation today.

One of the models of slidy things took on the local name for a “sled” and later became an Olympic sport in 1964.