From Durham, USA
(May 25, 2022) – For our second athlete profile of 2022 (and the 36th in the “Getting to Know…” series) we catch up with American luger Zack Digregorio. Zack slid in his first Olympics in 2022, teaming with Sean Hollander to finish 11th in the doubles event and seventh alongside Ashley Farquharson and Chris Mazdzer in the team relay event. As a junior luge athlete he won silver in 2019 (Altenberg) and podiumed in multiple national championships and seeding races.
If there’s a slider you’d like to get to know, drop a note in the contact form above or on Twitter: @thekenchilds
Slider: Zack Digregorio
Home Track: Lake Placid
Hometown: Medway, Massachusetts, USA
Team: USA Luge
We’ll start like we always do: What’s our favorite track and why?
For me, I’d say that as much as it hurts me, it’s probably Sigulda. It’s super easy to mess up there, but when you get it right it’s amazing. And it’s a little more special now because that’s where Sean (Hollander) qualified for our first Olympics.
People go there the first time and it’s an experience. What was it like for your first time in Sigulda?
It was Junior World Championships that year, and it was my first JWCs, and at the time only a couple of my teammates had been there before. So I’m going in pretty blind, and Sean was on the team with me as well. He was one of the few who’d been there before.
We’re on the track walk with our coach and he’s like “Alright, this is a serious track…it’s not one where you can slip up much!” and I turn to Sean and ask him if it’s that bad? Is it going to be the track that hurts you the most, and he starts laughing and goes “Yup! It is!”
It’s the middle of January, it’s super cold, ice was super hard and it was before I’d known much about how to slide. I was getting by at that point, but it was my first year in Europe. I hit walls and crashed that whole week. Then one of my teammates, Chevonne Forgan, got pretty badly injured with a crash. So that happened right when I was going to go the top at race height and the coaches were like “Nope, nobody is moving up!” and I ended up not racing at that Junior Worlds, and I was pretty terrified of that place for a while.
But we started going there for pre-seasons and I got a lot more comfortable with it.
Which is your favorite town to visit on the schedule?
Always Whistler and Park City, they’re just cool places, but overseas I’d say Innsbruck. It’s always a really good energy there and just amazing sights and everything. I spend a decent bit of time there because I have two friends there, one was on the team and one is still on the Austrian team. So I spend time there even when we’re not doing luge, it’s really fun there.
Is there somewhere in particular you like to go?
I love doing the naturbahn, so every chance I get we find some little ski hill that we can do on it.
This website is probably the only one in North Carolina writing about natural track luge, so I have to ask you: Have you had any interest in trying a Natural Track World Cup event?
Yes, I have! But I know I wouldn’t be competitive at it at all. I was talking to Leon Felderer, who got into luge through natural track, and he was like “I was pretty good at it, but if you put anyone in luge in it they’d be too confident going in and they’d try to go too fast and they’d end up in the boards there. So I agree with him on that, I’d love to give it a shot though and go up and visit our US team and we should definitely do a local out there where they try artificial and we try natural!
Not related to sliding, where’s your favorite place to visit?
A couple of years ago we did a little cruise in the Mediterranean and fell in love with Montenegro, even though I was there for just two days. But it was absolutely amazing.
Now I’m going on another vacation, and this one might up it: We’re going to Monaco for the Formula 1 race. I didn’t think I ever would, so I’m really happy for that one!
How did you get into luge coming from Massachusetts?
It was about as random as you could think! We were going to Kimball Farm, it’s about 45 minutes away, and there was a tryout that my mom had heard about from her friend who works at Norton, who is one of our main sponsors. It happened to line up on a nice summer day, and we were already going to get ice cream and the tryout was just five minutes away. So me and my brother went over and we tried out, and it kind of took off from there.
We didn’t think anything of it at the time. But we were visiting my grandmother and my mother got an email saying we were invited back and we were like “Oh that’s cool…maybe we’ll do it or maybe we won’t.” It was probably two years that we did it before it became a serious thing.
You were a singles competitor until 2020. How did you make the move from singles to doubles?
Sean and I have been really good friends since we started luge. We’d always make jokes like “this is the year that we’re going to do doubles!” and the coaches would be like “No, you’re not, you’re a singles guy and you’re sticking to singles.”
I’d tried doing doubles when I was maybe 13 with Duncan Segger, who’s now doing it with Dana (Kellogg), as a joke mostly. But flash forward a year and a half before the 2022 Olympic Games and Rob Fegg, who was our coach at the time, pulled us aside and said “With this COVID situation we can only send four men, so one of you guys are going to stick around and train for singles here in Lake Placid, and the other one of you is going to go…unless you want to make a run for doubles. You’d both stay in Lake Placid and train but you’d be together and you could see what happens.”
It was going to be a hard fight to out-qualify Chris (Mazdzer), Jonny (Gustafson) and Tucker (West), so doing doubles and seeing what happened wasn’t the worst idea. So we did it, and it was kind of brutal to start; Lake Placid winters aren’t exactly fun and that track is pretty unforgiving! But we kind of jumpstarted a doubles team and got there over a year and a half.
Your teammate Chris Mazdzer had done doubles for a little while then went on to have a huge singles career, but then got back and did both for a while. Have you had any thought of doing that?
I think I’m going to focus on doubles…but who ever really knows? As we found out a couple of years ago we never know where things are going to take us. It’s been really cool to learn doubles…you don’t have crazy quick growth in singles when you’ve been doing it for a decade, but you switch to doubles and you feel those quick rewards, and that’s been really cool that way.
We tried to race a World Cup race for singles in Winterberg this year because of how the points would have worked out, it would have given us the best chance to get three men into the Olympics. Sean and I jumped on singles sleds for a week and tried to race a World Cup…we weren’t able to, but it was a good idea.
I don’t have any plans to go back to singles at the moment, I could see Sean doing it before I would do it, but nothing definite like that yet.
After you qualified for the Olympics and Jayson Terdiman was out, he really took you all under his wings and tried to get you as prepared as possible for Beijing. What did that mean to you?
It was the true “Olympic spirit” that people talk about. He’s truly the best teammate I’ve ever had, and I’ve played so many sports and had tons of teammates over that time, and there’s no one that compares.
You look at the whole season, and he’s the one doing a track walk with Sean and I every week, he’s the one telling us what the lines are, and he was even doing that in Sigulda when he knows that if we beat him we go to the Olympics and he doesn’t. So he was the best teammate I could ever have imagined to have. And with him stepping away and starting to coach, it’s been me and Sean nagging at USA Luge to keep him with us. I’m a huge advocate of Jayson and he’s been a huge role model through all of this.
The season has been over for a bit, and you’re getting back into training, what did you do with your downtime?
For this year it’s a little different than normal. I couldn’t go home for Christmas this year since my family all got COVID right at the time I was supposed to come home. I decided to stay in Europe, so once I did finally get home after the season I wanted to see my family as much as possible. After some time at home I took a trip down to Tampa, Florida because one of my best friends growing up goes to school there. It was the perfect timing that they were on spring break so six or seven of us were all able to go out for a week. It was really nice to have everyone around!
What is your pre-race routine?
For us I normally am a big fan of walking the track, so I’ll do that and start visualizing everything. Sean does to a certain extent, but he doesn’t do the full track walk, it’s just not a part of his routine. And then after that we’ll have a conversation, make a plan for what these runs are going to be like…depending on if it’s a one or two training run day or a race or whatever. We’ll talk about anything in particular I saw on the track walk.
After that we go separate ways for warming up, then we visualize just before getting ready and talk again to point out the spots we thought we had trouble at during training. Then I’m almost fully ready to go before Sean even starts getting ready, so it’s a really stressful ten minutes before we start going. I turn to Sean and he’s just putting on his thermals and stuff, so now that’s just part of our routine!
I forget which run it was in the Olympics, but one run he started getting ready at almost the same time as me and I turned to him and was like “You can’t do that, you’ve got to wait!” So it’s been what we’ve done our whole time as a doubles team so we’ve kept it that way.
Do either of you take the lead on working on the sled?
I think both coming from singles backgrounds and neither of us trying to do both singles and doubles we both have the time to be in there working on the sled. So we try to spend as much time together with the sled as possible so we both know any changes being made. It’s been good to split the workload on the sled prep.
Tell us about your pets!
My family has two Wheaten Terriers. We adopted one a year and a half ago, his name is Zeus and he was in rough shape. He had ear infections, was super light, and he still can’t hear now but he’s back to being healthy! He’s super quirky but is really fun.
Our other dog is Charlie, he’s about 12 now. She’s nice and chill, so we’ve got a little mix of both.
My sister really wanted a puppy and she somehow convinced my mom to go to a place to get a dog, and once we got there it was pretty much game over. Once we got her there she was convinced we needed one.
What’s been your favorite sliding moment?
I think for Sean and I it was the second run at the Olympics in our race there. It was a hard season for us this past year, and we really needed all of the stars to align just right to qualify. It happened, and then after that you’re stressed because you did qualify and now you need to race at the Olympics.
That first run wasn’t our worst, but it wasn’t what we wanted at the Olympics. So after that we said “We’ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain…”, we did a little fist bump and got on the sled and had our best run in China of the whole season. I was really excited and there’s a great picture of me screaming because it was just such a great run.
On the other side, what’s been your toughest moment of your career?
Probably the beginning of the season: Building our sled was a mess, and as we were finishing up building our sled and it’s a couple days before we leave for Sochi, and I get mono, and I couldn’t leave. Sean goes over there, starts sliding, and right after Mazdzer broke his foot Sean goes down and he breaks his foot as well. So it was one thing after the next. I got a call from Sean like “oh, I broke my foot…”, I was supposed to come over to Russia two days after that, so it was just that unknown part of everything was super challenging things. I eventually got over there, he slid with a broken foot and I think we crashed in seven out of ten runs and we made it out of Sochi there.
Guest question: Jane Channell (Canada skeleton): If you were stuck on a desert island, or on a start ramp, and could only have three things, what would they be?
I would say the three things I want: Great people surrounding me, some way to get water, and…I don’t know, I would have said my phone but I just did a trip without my phone…so probably just a nice sleeping bag. Somewhere good to sleep would be important!
