Close Encounters

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Drivers swap brakemen like prom dates; soap opera surrounds the U.S. women's team like a Lake Placid cold front. Before the 2002 Olympics, driver Jill Bakken, the eventual gold-medal winner, jilted Rohbock, her partner of three years, for Vonetta Flowers. Jean Prahm dumped her best friend, Jen Davidson, for Gea Johnson. Now Prahm has picked Flowers, and after switching to the driver position, Rohbock is teamed with roommate Valerie Fleming. Bakken was back after a two-year hiatus but lost to Rohbock for one of two driver spots on the Olympic team. Got it? "There's so much drama, it's ridiculous," says Rohbock. A saving grace, she insists, is that the women now travel with the men on the World Cup circuit. Says Rohbock: "It's just been a good release to be with them and get away from the girls."

Partner swapping is less common in luge, since it takes years to get in synch. The top driver steers the sled through treacherous curves with his legs while the bottom driver rolls his shoulders to complete the turn. The key to doubles luge, says Italian coach Marco Andreatta, is "understanding each other only through physically feeling the athlete and knowing how to manage the reaction. You have to feel the sensations and interpret them as best you can."

That awkward contact presents another challenge for "sliders"--jokes from bemused spectators (the punch line of a Robin Williams riff on doubles luge: "Boys, get a room!"). Some brush them off: "If I wasn't luging, I'd be the one making fun of it," says Canada's Chris Moffat, a former singles rider now paired with younger brother Mike. Others take exception to the cracks. "O.K., we've heard the joke a million times," says Martin, 32, who won bronze with Grimmette in '98, silver in '02 and is chasing the U.S.'s first-ever luge gold.

At the rink, with so many partners ending up inand out ofromances, the athletes call the skating soap opera As the Blade Turns. "Being a skating partner is like being in a marriage, without the sex," says top U.S. ice dancer Ben Agosto, whose partnership with newly minted U.S. citizen Tanith Belbin, a Canada native, could yield the U.S.'s first ice-dancing medal since 1976. "Well, for some people." Agosto and Belbin are not romantically involved.

Since skating routines are inherently sensual, off-ice contact is inevitable. Love has certainly worked for Melissa Gregory and Denis Petukhov, the other top U.S. dancing pair. Gregory met Petukhov, a Russian, five years ago on an Internet message board for skaters. Petukhov flew to Colorado to test the pairing. "If it wasn't going to work, I was going to put him right back on the plane and say, 'Adios, I'm going to college,'" says Gregory. The pair clicked on the ice, started dating after about two weeks and were married in five months. Skeptics chirped that Gregory pulled a classic "Rent-a-Russian"--marry Petukhov so he can gain U.S. citizenship and qualify for the team. Gregory's response: "After we go to the Olympics and there's no divorce, then they'll start to come around and say, 'Oh, well, maybe we were wrong.'"