SPEED DEMON
Olympic gold medallist Kaillie Humphries is in the business of going fast
Adrenalin in the veins. Breath loud in the helmet. Cheers of the crowd fade to a far-off roar. Flags from a hundred nations create a riot of colour, but her eyes see nothing but the river of white, her mind already running through the banked corners, the six Gs and more than 150 km/h to come.
There’s a pause, an instant, a few crystalline seconds marking the transition between four years of training and less than 58 seconds of competition. A heartbeat. Two. Her hands tighten on the bar.
Push! The two-woman pair explode over the first 40 metres of ice, muscle and sinew and bone pistoning, shoving the carbon-fibre sled up to speed. In three seconds she’s up and over the side, into the driving position. The sled is alive under her, the world watching as the vessel enters the first corner. This is where she’s meant to be — racing for gold.
Two-time Olympic goldmedal-winning bobsledder Kaillie Humphries is a drop-forged badass, a compact package of steely strength and determination hammered out in the furnace of her own will to win. Her physique is part weightlifter, part sprinter, and covered in tattoos like a Maori warrior. Add in a Hunger Games side-shaved haircut, and Katniss Everdeen would be running away to cower in a tree.
All of which might be intimidating if she wasn’t so damn nice. Our Olympic committee couldn’t have picked a better person to have carried the flag into the closing ceremonies of the 2014 winter games in Sochi: Humphries has drive, leadership, and skill, but she’s the exact opposite of aloof — always a megawatt grin, always a laugh.
What a great ambassador for Canada: yeah we’re polite, but when the steel’s on the ice. we’re here to win. Sorry about that, eh?
It’s a blend of competitiveness and sportsmanship that’s just seen Humphries, 29, awarded the Lou Marsh Trophy as Canada’s top athlete. The win puts her in such elite company as Wayne Gretzky and Nancy Greene.
Hand Humphries the key to a 425-horsepower BMW M4 at a racetrack and it’s no surprise what happens next.
“It’s so fun!” she enthuses, “the adrenalin comes out and the speed freak comes out — if you give me the power, I’m going to use it!”
“She’s simply a natural,” says Tony Morris Jr. of Morrisport Advanced Driving in B.C. Morris is a multiple podium winner in everything from open wheel racers to track-prepped Mustangs, and knows raw talent when he sees it. “Kaillie was really fast right away and just got faster as the day went on.”
BMW Canada provides vehicles, funding, and fundraising for several of our Olympic winter teams. There’s also occasional perks, such as dropping in on a lapping session with Bimmer’s M-Power Tour, a multi-event cross-Canada showcase of the company’s performance vehicles with professional instructors.
With Humphries’ breakout performance in bobsledding, it’s not surprising she was able to climb into the cockpit and sling a twinturbo kampfpanzer around the track like a pro.
“It’s the kind of thing you’re either going to be able to do or not,” she says of her bobsled pilot’s training. “They just kind of push you off. You’re either going to crash every time or be able to do it.”
At first, she started out as an alpine ski racer (parallels with champion Austrian rally driver Walter Röhrl) but stepped away from the sport after two crashes that resulted in broken limbs. It wasn’t so much the pain as the sense that alpine racing wasn’t her route to the Olympics. She considered both speedskating and bobsleigh, and began training for the latter as a brakeman.
A chance ankle injury left Humphries sidelined at the 2006 Olympics. She was there with the team, but as a spare, not a competitor.
With the encouragement of family, she enrolled in driver training, and it’s here that something just clicked. The desire to compete and succeed suddenly dovetailed with a natural ability to translate vision into speed, to dance the sled on its knife-edged runners the way an expert driver balances traction in the wet. She grasps a pair of ropes rather than a steering wheel, but the hand-eye-mind-machine connection is the same.
Hearing Humphries talk about carbon-fibre bodywork, spring rates, weight-transfer, chassis tuning, and hitting the perfect racing line, there’s also the sense that there’s considerable overlap between the worlds of bobsleigh and motorsport.
“A two-man sled costs about $150,000, a four-man around $200,000,” she explains. “Our trailer is about the same size as those used in NASCAR and comes with a full workshop. We bring all our own stuff with us, and you keep what you’re doing quiet.”
As more manufacturers move into research and development of composite materials, there’s even more engineering crossover. BMW currently builds the sleds used by the American team; McLaren consults on the British team’s machines, and Italy’s bobsleigh was built in partnership with Ferrari. The Canadian sleds are made by Netherlandsbased Eurotech Viking, with a background in motorsport that extends to racing at Le Mans.
Construction is one thing, but there’s also considerable mechanical sympathy found here between sled and pilot. Humphries named her two-man sled Thorfin after her greatgrandfather, and the white BMW X5 she drives has a name too.
“I name all my cars,” she laughs. “I call the X5 Betty White because anything Betty White is awesome. I’d love to be like her when I’m old.”
Humphries says she used her smart side when choosing the BMW-provided X5.
“I’d have an M4, ideally,” she says, “but then I’d also have to live in Germany without speed limits.”
Her X5 is capable enough to handle the snowy conditions around her hometown of Calgary, big enough to carry a burly bobsled team, and occasionally even gets involved in training. It’s very rare, she says, but if the team is out on the road, away from their dedicated gear, they’ll push a car as a way to maintain that explosive off-theline punch.
Perhaps a better motorized-extension of her personality can be found in her custommade Yamaha XS650. A café racer built by Kevin Dunworth of Loaded Gun Customs in Delaware, the bike is at once elegant and powerful. It’s a no-fat, all-muscle build with delicate details, such as a diamond-quilted seat and rose-pink emblems on the fuel tank. Neither big-displacement bruiser nor cruiser, nor an organ-donor sport bike, it’s a pure and nimble expression of a blended ideal.
“I don’t need to go rocket speeds,” Humphries says. “I enjoy the peacefulness and quiet of riding a motorcycle.”
It’s not an experience she often enjoys; even with the sledding season just wrapped up, there’s little downtime. Besides securing the sponsorships required to allow for months of training, Humphries is also involved with a number of charities and initiatives. Most recently, she’s lent her name to a campaign to encourage more young girls and women to engage in sports, break barriers and achieve their goals.
With two gold medals and a place in the history books as being one of the first women to compete head-to-head with the men in four-man bobsleigh, you might imagine that Humphries has achieved her goals. You’d be wrong.
“I’m thinking three years ahead,” she says, speaking of the 2018 Olympics, “how to put together a competitive team, push the envelope.”
She’s pushed off, moved the weight, and is now mid-track. Kaillie Humphries is right where she’s supposed to be — in the driver’s seat — and she’s still gathering speed.