From the hard court to the icy track
Conestogo woman embraces the bobsleigh after illness took her away from playing basketball
A CONESTOGO NATIVE IS GETTING set to represent Canada at the world championships in bobsleigh, a sport she never considered competing in until a few years ago.
Alex Klein’s athletic career path was on the hardwood of the basketball court, not the slippery ice of a sliding track. That was until 2018, when playing professionally in Luxembourg, she started to get sick.
“It was very difficult, because I didn’t know what was going on with my body. It wasn’t just the typical, you’re getting a cold or like the normal sickness that one might have. And also being alone, even though I made friends with all my teammates, you still are quite alone and across the world from your family. I just remember calling my mom and being like, ‘something’s wrong.’ The symptoms aren’t normal. I’ve never had them before,” explained Klein, who spoke to The Observer over Zoom from Austria.
Klein experienced weight loss and pains, which she described as “total discomfort in all different areas.” After returning to Canada, she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (similar to Crohn’s disease) in her large intestine. At this point, she thought her athletic career was over.
“I had no way nowhere in my mind to continue with athletics,” she said.
It was a physiotherapist with Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton who initially brought up the idea of Klein making the jump to the sport. Still, she did not consider the suggestion seriously until she realized there was more left in her tank. She compared her experience to other athletes who have suffered major injuries.
“You feel like sport is taken from you. That’s kind of how I felt – it’s out of your control. You have this injury. Let’s say you have this thing now – how do you kind of come back from that? Where do you go from there?” she said.
While her illness is under control, she has had to learn to manage a chronic condition and train while she is feeling symptoms, which is a “journey of its own,” she said.
An alternate on the team last season, Klein started competing this year as a brakewoman, teaming up with two-time Olympian Melissa Lotholz. Klein said that her time as an alternate helped her learn the ins and outs of the sport. There is more behind the scenes that goes into the
competition than her previous sport of basketball, she added.
“People only see the first 50 seconds to a minute that you’re going down the track. And no one knows the behind the scenes of what’s actually happening in this world. We do a ton of labour-intensive stuff. We are constantly doing sled maintenance – we’re always polishing the runners, which takes hours and hours.
All of that stuff behind the scenes, it took me a little bit to get kind of in the loop of how this sport works. Basketball, you just show up with a ball and a hoop and shoes, and you’re ready to play.”
Right now, Klein and Lotholz are entirely selffunded and have set up a GoFundMe to help cover costs.
Because Lotholz took last season off, Canada lost one of its three World Cup slots, meaning the team started this season in the lower-tier North American Cup (NAC). The pair was tasked with obtaining enough points to get that spot back, which they did after a string of successful races.
The team finished second on back-to-back days in Lake Placid, NY, last November and took two golds the following month, one in Park City, Utah and the other in Whistler, BC. A fifth-place result (also in Whistler) was the lowest they ranked in any NAC race this season. In preparation for the world championships set for Winterberg, Germany, Klein competed in two Europe Cup races in Innsbruck, Austria, this month. She earned a fourth-place result with Lotholz and a 14th-place result with Kristen Bujnowski.
Heading into the world championships, Klein is experiencing a mixture of emotions to compete with the best athletes in the sport and to represent her country on the world stage. The two-women bobsleigh event will be held on March 1.
“I know that I have so much more in the tank like improvement wise, development wise. And I’m like frothing at the mouth to unlock what I’m capable of. But also give myself a pat on the back and be proud of myself for persevering and getting to this point. So I’m ecstatic,” Klein added.
While there is still one more race on the schedule after the world championships, Klein is excited about the offseason because it is a chance to get better.
“That’s where you get improvement in winter sports is the offseason. You get strong, you get fast and you try to maintain that throughout the season. It’s very easy to kind of decline in this sport,” she said,
She also has an eye on the 2026 Winter Olympics.
“To be able to say I came from a basketball background to get there is wild, but then if you asked me last year if I’d be racing at world championships this year, I would also say that that’s wild. You never know how much you can really close that gap.”