CU graduate now an unlikely Olympian
The University of Colorado might seem like an unusual place to produce an Olympic skeleton slider, as would California’s Central Valley, but both were formative locales in the unlikely story of Kendall Wesenberg.
Wesenberg, a 2012 CU graduate who grew up in Modesto, Calif., was one of two women named to the U.S. Olympic skeleton team last week, along with Breckenridge product Katie Uhlaender, who will be making her fourth trip to the Olympics. Wesenberg’s path to PyeongChang began in 2010 when she was a student in Boulder and saw a telecast of bobsledding at the Vancouver Olympics. She had been a soccer player in high school, and when she heard commentators mention that the U.S. Bobsled & Skeleton Federation recruits athletes from other sports to throw themselves down tracks of solid ice at 80 to 90 mph, she was intrigued.
“I thought it looked cool,” Wesenberg said. “The fact that they had recruited people from sports that people had already done was a huge part of me taking interest in it a little bit more than I probably would of another sport. I Googled it and found skeleton through that. They (bobsled and skeleton) have the same combine, so I emailed the address that was on the site. Basically it was like, ‘How do I get involved?’ I ended up signing up for a combine.”
When she got to CU, she thought her days as a serious athlete were over as a result of get- ting burned out on soccer in high school and didn’t want to spend another four years with her life revolving around the game. In Boulder she kept it mellow by playing club soccer for fun.
“Then skeleton came up,” Wesenberg said, “and it was like, ‘Maybe I could still be an athlete.’ ”
She tested well at the combine in the summer of 2010 and then signed up the following winter for a “driving school,” which allows prospective bobsled and skeleton athletes to try the sport.
“I never made it to the top of the track during that driving school,” said Wesenberg, 27. “It was just like a couple days of sliding. We made it a little ways up and kind of learned the basics of driving, but I was still in school at CU at the time.”
After finishing up her last two years in Boulder, she learned the sport by training for a season and a half at the facility in Park City, Utah, where the 2002 Olympics were held. She spent the winter of 2014-15 on the developmental Europa Cup, becoming the first American to win that tour’s season title, and is now in her third season on the World Cup circuit. A year ago she earned her first World Cup podium, finishing second at St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Could it be that she’s a natural? “I don’t know if anybody is a natural at what we do, but it definitely was something that registered to me,” Wesenberg said. “I picked it up pretty quick, I think. Everyone has a different learning curve in the sport. Some are really slow-building and then take off. Some are vice versa and some are a little more up and down.”
The U.S. Olympic skeleton selections were named last week, but Wesenberg had a World Cup race Friday in Koenigssee, Germany, that required her immediate focus. It was only this past weekend that she had time to reflect on the unlikely series of events that began while watching the Olympics eight years ago in Boulder.
“I don’t know if it will really feel real until we’re in Korea,” Wesenberg said, “but it’s pretty crazy, pretty unreal.”