APPIAH IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT ON ROAD TO BEIJING OLYMPICS
Canadian bobsledder looking to smash colour barrier and control her destiny
Power pushed Cynthia Appiah onto the national team.
Power in her legs. Power in her upper body. The power to push a 375-pound bobsled up to 50 metres in about five seconds.
How cruel then that on the cusp of pushing a Canadian sled in the Pyeongchang Olympics, Appiah felt powerless. Crushed. Defeated.
With two weeks to go before the Games, after three years of competing as a brakewoman on the World Cup circuit and eight years in the sport, Appiah was told she’d be named an alternate for the Olympics. She would push only during qualifying runs or as a replacement if a race brakewoman was injured.
“You realize very quickly how little power you have over your destiny,” Appiah said during an interview in Calgary earlier this month.
If that feeling of helplessness leaves you less than thrilled with your lot in life, as it surely did the 28-year-old from Toronto, you do something about it. You take back your power.
As the first season of a new Olympic quadrennial dawns, Appiah is literally in the driver’s seat. She has switched from brakewoman to pilot. The goal is to compete in two-woman and monobob at the Beijing Olympics in 2022; and ultimately to erase her first Games experience.
“It’s supposed to be a joyous occasion and it should be. You watch it on TV from home and all you see are these great stories, everyone is helping each other, everything is all touchy feely, and everything is great. You don’t see some of the behind-the-scenes things that go on. Because there are people who go to the Olympic Games, they are considered athletes, but you feel like a spectator.”
The Canadian Olympic bobsled team was announced at a media conference in Calgary at the end of last January. Appiah was there, trying to hold herself together by relying on the inner strength that propelled her onto the team in the first place. She had been told a week earlier that she would be an alternate.
“I was upset, I was angry. Looking back, I’m glad I went, but I knew it being a televised event, it was going to be really hard to hold back my emotions,” she said.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t hold it back anymore. I cried before we walked on stage. Then I held it back as best I could. Once the lights were down and cameras were off, I just let it all out again. It was too hard.”
The Games were even harder. On Day 2 of training, she knew she wouldn’t be getting a seat on race day.
“I was like ‘I don’t even know why I’m here. I cannot wait to go home.’”
And she couldn’t allow herself to feel that way again. So, on the advice of former national teamer Shelley-Ann Brown, Appiah attended a driving school in Lake Placid last spring. She crashed her monobob four times; three spills on the same day.
But it was equipment failure. The first crash cracked her visor and she didn’t have a replacement, so she bought ski goggles at a local sports store. They didn’t fit well and were obscuring her vision. With help from a Jamaican slider, she eventually rigged them up so she could see and went on to complete more than 50 runs with the sled in an upright position. And she was convinced right then and there that she made the right move into the front seat. It was time.
Appiah got into bobsled in 2010 at a dry land camp at York University in Toronto, where she was on a track and field scholarship. She was a decent sprinter and a good, not great thrower.
As time wore on, she knew she had no shot at an Olympic berth in throwing. But she wanted to get to a Games and bobsled presented an opportunity.
“I’ve always wanted to go back to throwing and I don’t know what it was, but bobsled was always the answer to whatever question I was asking, even when I didn’t know I was asking.”
So she stuck with it. And now she’s on the cusp of doing something powerful again.
“In the sport of bobsled, the majority of people of colour stay as a brakeman. That colour barrier has been broken many years ago, but very few transition into being a pilot. I just feel I have what it takes. Maybe it’s possible to be a good pilot in four years, or maybe it takes eight years.
“Canada has never had a black pilot. I want to be that first one and show the brakemen coming up in the program that you don’t have to stay as a brakeman. You can easily transition yourself, be a pilot, be good at it, and take control of your destiny.”
It’s supposed to be a joyous occasion and it should be . ... You don’t see some of the behindthe-scenes things that go on.