Love lost, passion found
Canadian Channell finds comfort in sport after boyfriend’s sudden death
Jane Channell races 130 kilometres an hour headfirst down an ice track, steering her sled with slight movements of her shoulders and legs.
To most people it looks like a crazy thing to do, and that is one of the reasons she does it. Channell was 13 years old when she and her grandfather turned on the TV to see skeleton racing at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. As soon as he said “they’re crazy,” she bookmarked the sport as something to try one day.
But the turning point in her life that gave her the strength to actually pursue that idea, when the time came a decade later, is a tragic one.
She’s Canada’s top skeleton racer today because of a boy who grew up in Vienna, Austria and followed his dream of playing American football.
Bernd Dittrich’s passion took him to Simon Fraser University, where he became the team’s star quarterback and roomed in residence across the hall from Channell, a varsity sprinter. Their love affair was a joy to see. “They were both the right amount of weird for each other. They were just really happy together,” Channell’s friend Hali Wong said.
“I was as high as anybody could ever be,” Channell said, recalling her early university years. “School was going well, track was going well, Bernie and I were great, my friends were all great.”
But two years later, in 2009, she got a call in the middle of the night: the 21-year-old Dittrich was dead.
“In a matter of literally a second I hit rock bottom,” she said. “My whole future was gone. We had talked about marriage and everything. My best friend was gone and that was the hardest thing.”
The evening before, on Nov. 10, they walked to the athletic complex together. Dittrich, rehabilitating a shoulder injury, went swimming. Channell spoke to her coach and then went home.
Dittrich, it turned out, had an undetected heart condition.
“When you hear about the soccer players or basket- ball players that just drop dead on the field or court, that’s exactly what happened, except he was in the pool,” she said.
Channell was devastated. She left school and went home to her parents in Vancouver for a couple of weeks before she could even start to face life again.
“The reason why I’m here really is because he was the one to always dream big.” SKELETON RACER JANE CHANNELL ON BERND DITTRICH (PHOTO, LEFT)
When she returned to school, friends and teammates helped her pull through, spending nights on her couch so she didn’t have to be alone.
But Channell had an inner strength that her friends could see, Wong said. “I don’t know how somebody could be that strong. Obviously she was broken, sad and devastated, but there was a strength she had that kept her pushing all the time. She kept moving forward, and in such a beautiful way that respected and honoured Bernie.”
She went back to class, trying to get through a day without crying, and to the track, where in the midst of intense workouts she felt free.
When Channell graduated with a degree in physical geography, she gathered all her belongings — and memories of Dittrich — and headed for the nearest sliding track to become a skeleton racer.
“I moved up to Whistler in the winter of 2011 without ever having tried the sport and said: This is what I want to do.”
Her racing helmet bears his football uniform number: 7, flanked by two wings.
“I know he’s always watching over me, and with skeleton, especially when I was first learning, let’s just say my runs weren’t the smoothest or cleanest,” she said, laughing.
But she carries more than his number and a belief that he’s a guardian angel on a sled with no breaks.
“The reason why I’m here really is because he was the one to always dream big,” she said. “(Without him) I probably would have finished university with track and field and softball and left it at that, but he gave me the courage to look outside the box and to even be able to think that this is possible.”
Channell made the national development team after two years of sliding and moved up to the World Cup team in 2015.
Last season, on the strength of her fast push starts, she was ranked third in the world.
Channell, 28, was again named to Canada’s skeleton team on Wednesday — along with Elisabeth Vathje, Mirela Rahneva, Barrett Martineau, Dave Greszczyszyn and Kevin Boyer.
As she prepares for the Dec. 2 World Cup in Whistler — the first race of the 2018 Olympic selection period — she can’t help but think of what Dittrich might say about her new career.
“He’d probably laugh and tell me I’m crazy, but he would also probably say I want to do that,” she said, remembering him with laughter.