Patrick Antaki '84
Alumnus Proves Smart Guys Reach the Olympics Too
Patrick Antaki '84 competes in Nagano, Japan at the 2003 World Championships.
Patrick Antaki '84, a self-employed engineer and entrepreneur living in Texas, is not your typical Olympian. He's never even been much of an athlete, except for some recreational rugby. So how did he end up competing in the Winter Olympics in Torino? He decided to make it happen.
Antaki saw televised coverage of the sled racing sport called skeleton four years ago during the Salt Lake City Olympics, when the sport reappeared after a 54-year hiatus. He's never had visions of Olympic glory, but Antaki was looking for something different to do. Different turned out to be a sport involving one person on a sled careening down a slick bobsled/luge track at speeds up to 80 mph. There are no brakes, and subtle weight shifts serve for steering.
Some 12 international competitions and nearly 500 runs later, Antaki secured a coveted spot at the Torino Games representing his birth country of Lebanon, where he has dual citizenship. He's the first non-skier to represent the Middle Eastern nation in the games and joined two skiers to form the 2006 team.
Patrick Antaki '84 represented his birth country of Lebanon in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.
How did he do it? "Nothing was for sure, of course, but I did my homework, read everything I could about the sport, talked to a bunch of people, and actually tried it. And even though I was really terrible at it for the first year, I had a pretty good idea of what it would take to get up to the level where I could get into the Olympics," Antaki says. "The message is simple: if you're smart, and you study, even though this is an athletic thing, using your brain actually does help."
Antaki qualified for the Olympics in January at the Challenge Cup in Germany, securing the last of eight spots in the level of worldwide competition one tier below the World Cup circuit. He beat out 21 other competitors for the slot.
The Olympic competition played out according to Antaki's expectations, although he was slightly unnerved at the media spectacle. "It's the first time I actually was in the same race with the world's best in the sport," he says. "My goal was just to get there and to finish and that was it, fully expecting to be last." His last place finish, eight and a half seconds behind the gold medal winner, however, was encouraging enough to set his sights on Vancouver in 2010.
The trick to skeleton, Antaki says, is negotiating the many variables: a slider's weight and speed, the weather, ice quality, how well the sled's runners are polished, how one enters turns. "This is very much a skill sport, and it just takes time to get good at it." And, of course, Antaki puts his MIT degree in electrical engineering to good use.
"I very quickly realized that there was no science developed in this sport," he says, noting the contradictory advice he received from fellow racers. "Over time, I've figured out that people don't really know what works. It's just a lot of trial and error." As a result, Antaki souped up his training sled with accelerometers, gyroscopes, and a camera to record data and compare runs to discern useful tactics.
"I think I'm at the point now where this is really going to help," he says. "My theory is that it will help me to get better faster." Next year, he'll spend time in Calgary and perhaps Lake Placid, training at two of the handful of tracks in North America. And next time he competes with the world's best, he vows that he won't be last. "I know exactly what I have to do to get to that level, and it's going to take time," he says. Time and a little science and engineering.
By Amy Marcott
Published February 27, 2006
