Putting the brakes on World Cup dream
Pilot Kaillie Humphries enters bobsled season without a top-level brakeman
Kaillie Humphries grew up thinking she’d be a ski racer.
But two broken legs, one right after the other, along with the nagging feeling that she’d never make the national team, let alone be an international star, put an end to those dreams at 16.
Her competitive nature could never settle for being just good; she wanted to be the best.
She found that opportunity racing a bobsled down an icy track. Humphries is a two-time Olympic gold medallist; the first person to break the gender barrier by competing against men in a four-man sled at the world championships and in most of the World Cup races last season; and winner of the 2014 Lou Marsh Trophy, awarded to Canada’s outstanding athlete.
It’s an impressive list of accolades. And, yet, the 30-year-old from Calgary is looking ahead to the bobsled season, which starts next month, with some trepidation.
Unlike her first sport, bobsled is a team event. She can’t possibly win alone and, right now, that’s a problem.
Canada has a shortage of brakemen — men and women. Those are the athletes whose explosive power on the push-start determines how fast the bobsled can get to the bottom of the track, no matter how good the pilot.
Humphries is one of the best bobsled pilots in the world and Canada’s surest bet to win medals on the World Cup circuit but, with only a month to go, she still has no idea who will be pushing her two-man sled.
“It sucks,” Humphries says, summing up her current dilemma. There was a time when Canada had a deep pool of strong brakemen and all a pilot had to worry about was driving. Things have changed and, as her results last year show, the calibre of the athlete in the back of sled matters, a lot.
For years, Humphries has been the most consistent winner on a bobsled track but, last season, the two-time Olympic champion didn’t set foot on the top step of a World Cup podium. With three different brakemen, including a rookie, she managed one silver and three bronze.
“Going in to Vancouver (2010 Olympics), we had five of the top eight girls in the world for brakemen,” she recalls. “It was easy for the pilot. You’re picking who is going to be able to give you the best. Now, I’m picking who is available.”
Attracting and retaining elite brakemen on the men’s side is just as difficult, as Canada’s top pilots, Justin Kripps and Chris Spring, know well.
“We’re struggling,” says Humphries. “I don’t exactly know why.”
That’s why she’ll be watching closely for any new athletes — identified through a series of testing camps across the country over the past two months — who make it to national
“Going in to Vancouver (2010), we had five of the top eight girls in the world for brakemen. It was easy for the pilot.” KAILLIE HUMPHRIES CHAMPION BOBSLEDDER
selections in October.
Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton’s final camp, its first-ever in Toronto, where they’re hoping to tap the region’s large athletic population, will be held Sunday at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre.
Brakemen don’t get as much attention as the pilots (who themselves don’t get a lot outside of the Olympics) but, inside the sport, their value is well understood.
“Heather Moyse was very much in the spotlight with Kaillie,” Esther Dalle says about the talented rugby player who pushed Humphries to back-to-back Olympic gold medals.
“Kaillie could not have done it without Heather. Most of the attention does go to the pilot but a top brakeman is just as important as the pilot,” says Dalle, the high-performance director of the Ontario Bobsleigh Skeleton Association who is overseeing the Toronto testing camp. With Moyse retired — again — Humphries is in the market for the lightning-fast teammate she needs to get back on top in the women’s event.
Bobsledding is never anyone’s first choice; athletes come second-hand from other sports.
Many come from track and field, football and rugby, but there have also been athletes from mountain biking, ski racing and soccer. American world champion Elana Meyers Taylor was a softball player.
“There is no exact formula,” Humphries says.
After a year or so, “you see that change of athlete from whatever they used to be to becoming a lot more of a bobsledder,” she says.
“A lot of people come back after year one completely different, if they do come back.”
Listening to her talk about the long hours of hard work, often in the freezing cold and living in hotels for months at a time while competing in relative obscurity in Europe, it’s easy to see why athlete retention might be a problem.
But, to Humphries and other bobsledders, the biggest appeal of the sport is a pretty simple one.
“Do you want to win an Olympic medal?” she asks.
“The option is there. Yeah, it’s in a way you wouldn’t have necessarily chosen,” says Humphries, who remembers her first Olympic dreams included a ski hill.
“This gives you an avenue to be the worlds best, which, inevitably, is why all athletes like sport.”