SLED ALERT
Kripps chases gold, Humphries pushes on,
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Before there was Kaillie Humphries, there was Jill Bakken.
The American was all of17 years old when she walked into the start house at the Lake Placid, N.Y., track in 1994 when the women’s bobsled circuit was just starting.
“It was just like a movie when a little girl walks into a garage with a bunch of guys,” Todd Hays, now Canada’s head bobsled coach, said in recalling that day.
“We’re like, ‘Are you looking for somebody? Is your dad here? Are you lost?’ ” Bakken was far from lost. She went on to win Winter Olympic gold with brakeman Vonetta Flowers at the 2002 Salt Lake City Games. That was the first time women were allowed to compete; men had been competing in the Games since 1924.
When Calgary’s Humphries drives down the track here Tuesday and Wednesday trying to win a third Winter Olympic gold in bobsled — something no woman or man has done — she knows she’s following the tracks laid down by the women who came before her.
“You’re not strong enough, you’re not fast enough, girls can’t do this — we try to break it down, step by step,” the 32-year-old Humphries said. “The girls before me have gotten me to where I’m at and, hopefully, I can help continue it for the women who come into the sport after me.”
Bakken, now 44, turned 18 in the birthplace of bobsled — St. Moritz, Switzerland — while competing on what would become the World Cup circuit.
The women weren’t allowed to call it a World Cup then. It was merely referred to as an international race. And they weren’t allowed to store their sleds where the men did; they weren’t even allowed in the start house itself and had to prepare for their runs in a nearby tent.
“They didn’t really want us, but there was some pressure to add women to the sport,” Bakken said in a phone interview from her home in Lethbridge, Alta. “It was a lot of stuff to fight through.”
And when she and the other pioneering women of those early days won races they were given lesser prizes than the men.
“I got sausages in a can and boxes of detergent,” she said, laughing.
When Humphries hit the bobsled world in 2002 as a brakeman before switching to driving four years later, women still weren’t allowed on all the tracks; some were deemed too dangerous for them.
So little was thought of a woman’s ability to safely navigate a bobsled down an icy track that when Bakken started driving on the old Lake Placid track, which had a particularly treacherous corner, the men would all gather to watch.
“They expected me to crash and they’d go down to watch,” Bakken said. She never did crash on that corner. “It’s an amazing transition to see it coming from nothing to where it is now,” said Hays, sitting in the back of a press conference room here at the Pyeongchang Games while Humphries and other Canadian bobsledders spoke to the media about their medal hopes.
After 12 years of driving a bobsled and winning World Cup titles, world championships and Olympic medals — even managing to hit the World Cup podium in years when she didn’t have the fastest equipment or the strongest brakeman — Humphries is renown for her driving abilities.
No one is waiting on a tough corner of the track expecting her to crash; they watch to learn the fastest way down, because she’ll find it.
“We all watch film and videotape of the best drivers and you’ll see men now watching Kaillie’s lines, and that’s something I’ve never seen before,” Hays said.
“She’s that girl that bridged the gap between men’s and women’s performances.”
Humphries is hoping to enact further changes, and take the whole women’s field with her. When women were included in the Olympics they were only given a sin- gle event — the two-man — while men also compete in the four-man event. That still hasn’t changed. Humphries was one of the first women to strongly challenge that inequality and, in 2015, made history as the first female pilot of a four-man sled in World Cup races and the world championships.
Humphries and American Elana Meyers Taylor, another pioneer who won silver in 2014 at Sochi and bronze in 2010 at Vancouver, knew they would never win a race against the men no matter how skilled their driving. This sport is decided on the start line, and their weight, strength and speed in the push start would never match a male pilot. They were doing it to prove that women were capable of handling the larger, faster sleds to try and push a reluctant sport federation into giving women their own event.
The international bobsled federation, FIBT, has made women’s fourman an exhibition event at the world championships but has given no indication it will be an Olympic event for women any time soon.
This week, Humphries’ focus is on making bobsled history by winning three consecutive Olympic gold medals.
Whether she succeeds or not, she’ll then resume her fight for the future of her sport.
“I have a responsibility to women in the sport,” Humphries said in an interview ahead of these Games.
“My goal is still to work from the inside, get women’s four-man and continue to break down the barriers and prove that we deserve those equal and same opportunities the men have,” she said.
“There’s a great legacy that I want to leave.”