Fort Washington native Sherk making his mark for USA Luge

In the early days, if Andrew Sherk didn’t have access to a luge, he’d improvise.

“I think my first run on a wheeled luge was when I was 12 years old in Fairmount Park,” he remembers. “That wasn’t my first interest in luge though. Sometimes I would lay on my skateboard and fly down a hill that was by my house.”
Sherk’s passion for the sport is very much alive, only these days the hills are a lot steeper and they take him all over the world.
Now living in Lake Placid, Sherk still calls Fort Washington his home.
He’s excelled in several big spots, finishing eighth in 2013 at the Lake Placid World Cup, he was a 2010 Junior National Doubles Champion, earned a bronze medal at the 2015 Lake Placid Nations Cup, and he was sixth in the 2015 Lake Placid World Cup.
The 24-year-old is speeding towards his goal of landing a spot on the 2018 USA Olympic Luge Team.
“I didn’t make it onto (Team USA) my first time but I was determined to make the team so I went to a different slider search somewhere in Connecticut the following year,” Sherk said. “I slowly started moving up the ranks and now I’m on the Senior National Team.”
Most recently, Sherk helped USA Luge cap January’s 47th Annual World Championships in Igls, Austria with a silver medal in the team relay, its third at this event, setting a team record for most hardware collected at Worlds.
And this was made possible by quite a degree of unselfishness and a strong embrace of the team concept.
The U.S. squad of Erin Hamlin, Tucker West and the doubles entry of Matt Mortensen and Jayson Terdiman raced to the silver medal, but West, Mortensen and Terdiman got into the relay because teammates gave up their rightful spots, with hopes that more experienced sliders would give the U.S. a better chance of winning a medal.
As a result, Taylor Morris gave up his spot to West, while the doubles team of Justin Krewson and Sherk yielded its place to Mortensen and Terdiman.
“After our first run we both agreed that we were going to give up the spot,” Sherk said. “(Mortensen and Terdiman) had been consistently going two-to-three tenths of a second faster in training so it seemed like the right thing to do for the team’s sake.
“They had a rough doubles race but I knew they would be able to perform for the relay.”
Sherk’s 2016-17 season has been impressive — he was 10th in the Park City World Cup doubles race and 10th in the Park City World Cup sprint race, as well as 11th at the Koenigssee, Germany World.
All of this led up to Worlds, where he and Krewson had the fastest first run among the three U.S. sleds, rightfully earning the team relay start.
“It wasn’t the best result but anything is better than crashing like we did last year,” Sherk said. “Our runs weren’t perfect but they were pretty solid, just a few problems in the bottom portion of the track but they were minor.”