All alone at luge, where closed doors offer a view of the Games’ best-kept secret.

The sleds introduced themselves with a rumbling roar, careening down the icy chute like clockwork. A blink at the wrong time would cause an observer to miss the fastest event of these Winter Games.

Some Olympic sports impress with their athleticism, or their physical prowess, or their grace and fluidity in movement. The National Sliding Center in Yanqing, the host of the Games’ bobsled, luge and skeleton events, offers something else, something unexpected: a disorienting and exhilarating view of sport.

It starts with the track.

The structure resembles a curling dragon jutting from the mountains nearly 50 miles northwest of Beijing. The sliding center is the only one of the three competition zones that bars even the few fans allowed into these Olympics.

So no fans and only a few journalists witnessed the sliding center’s first event, men’s singles luge, and its athletes hurtling down the track on their backs at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour. But even the few people watching often missed a lot, despite proximity to the action unrivaled at other venues.

One could roam along the nearly mile-long track and stand close enough to hear the low hum of the approaching sled, feel the wind’s hiss from a luger’s wake and see the imprint their sleds sliced into the ice.

Then, like a bullet, they were gone, zooming through another of 16 curves on the track.

The luge athletes descended in rhythmic precision. Every couple of minutes, another began their run, managing gravitational forces to control their sled. Their finishes were timed to the thousandth of a second.

Germany’s Johannes Ludwig, the eventual gold medal winner, and Japan’s Seiya Kobayashi were distanced by less than four seconds after their first runs. But they were separated by 30 competitors in the standings.

Understanding the event’s context took stepping back from the glistening ice and blistering speeds.

The absence of fans in the 2,000-seat venue left athletes cheering and congratulating their teammates near the track’s finish. The images on a large video screen ricocheted from view to view, capturing entire runs.

The loudest applause, from the cluster of volunteers in these mostly muted Olympics, came for Fan Duoyao, who became China’s first Olympic luger.

As they exited, the emotions of the athletes was evident. These few runs represented years of sacrifice, preparation and competition.

For Saba Kumaritashvili, 21, whose Olympics concluded with a pump of his fist after his final journey down, it meant fulfilling his family’s dreams in becoming the first luge athlete to compete from Georgia after his cousin, Nodar, was killed in a training accident just before the Vancouver Olympics.

For Austria’s Wolfgang Kindl, a silver medal validated the 33-year-old’s decision not to retire from the sport, a thought he pondered frequently the past few years.

For Italy’s Dominik Fischnaller, 28, a bronze medal helped wash away some of the feelings of four years ago, when two thousandths of a second separated him from a podium finish.

“The pressure is not coming from the front right now like in luge, but from the neck because of the medal,” Fischnaller said.

People watched the medal ceremony from a few feet away. The shine from the medals had replaced the glean off the ice. Italian athletes crowded the stand’s first row, clapping and shouting for Fischnaller as though he had just won gold.

Fischnaller squeezed and caressed the medal in his palm, almost as if to make sure it was real.

In these socially distanced Olympics, the National Sliding Center had provided a rare scene of intimacy.