RAHNEVA JUGGLES SKELETON, CATERING IN PURSUIT OF DREAM
Athlete sets sights on 2018 Games
Ottawa’s Mimi Rahneva routinely logs 13-hour workdays at Winsport’s Canada Olympic Park.
In the morning, she propels herself headfirst down the skeleton track. Then she lifts weights. Physiotherapy usually takes an hour or so to deal with the inevitable tweaks and muscle pulls that come with ripping down a canyon of ice at speeds that would net drivers a ticket on the Trans-Canada Highway.
“I don’t really think humans are meant to go 120 km/hour with their face so close to the ground,” says Rahneva, 28. “It’s a little big of an unnatural experience.”
From there, she showers and punches in for her job with the Winsport catering department — setting up tables, pouring coffee and tending to the logistics of weddings, bar mitzvahs and corporate holiday parties.
Long after the sun dips below the Rocky Mountains, she heads home for some much-needed sleep before waking up the next morning and doing it all over again.
Exhausted? You bet — not that she’s complaining. In fact, she’s just grateful for the opportunity to chase her dream of competing at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
“It’s hard, but it just becomes your regular life,” she says in a rare quiet moment outside the gym. “It’s a grind. You’re sore and you’re beat up. Sometimes, you crash and you’re a bit achy. “But I love it.” The notion of hard work is nothing new to Rahneva, who immigrated to Ottawa from Bulgaria at age 10.
Her dad Stoyan and mom Valentina touched down in Canada with university educations. Their accounting credentials meant nothing in Canada, so they initially took jobs delivering fast food and cleaning houses to pay the bills for their young family.
Rahneva credits her father — a competitive acrobatic gymnast back in the day — for providing a foundation for skeleton racing. Stoyan marked out a 100-metre sprint track on an Ottawa bicycle path and timed his daughter’s runs with a stopwatch. The ritual was performed more times than she can count.
Thanks to her raw speed and explosion off the line, Rahneva excelled in rugby at the University of Guelph, where she earned a commerce degree specializing in tourism management. During a short stint on Canada’s rugby sevens team, she met Heather Moyse, the two-time bobsled Olympic gold medallist.
Rahneva wanted to follow Moyse’s path from the rugby pitch to the bobsled track, but quickly realized she was too small at 5-foot-6 and 143 pounds to push the sled at an elite level.
She attended a testing camp with Bobsleigh Skeleton Canada and soon found herself on what felt like a glorified cafeteria tray on the Olympic track in Lake Placid, N.Y.
“They don’t tell you much before you try it, because the calmer you are, the smoother the ride,” she says. “After one run, you either think: ‘What is this? This is insane.’ Or you’re addicted to it.”
Rahneva was so addicted, she left her job at Luxe Destination Weddings in Toronto and headed west to Calgary in the summer of 2014 for a run at the national team. Two years later, she cracked the World Cup roster thanks in no small part to her tremendous foot speed.
“It’s definitely one of my strengths,” she says. “I’ve definitely had to work on my driving, but it’s beneficial to get a good start. That’s where you get all your momentum and speed, and it sets the tone for the whole run.”
As a wedding planner, Rahneva prided herself in helping the bride, groom, family members and friends budget for flights and accommodations in tropical spots like Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
These days, her personal finances are a jagged puzzle in which it feels likes pieces are missing. She brings in roughly $15,000 a year in federal and provincial carding money, but that doesn’t even cover off her team fees of $20,000 — never mind food and rent. So she looks for sponsors and works as a caterer in hopes of breaking even and avoiding the debt trap.
“Why do I do it? Because I want to represent Canada on the world stage,” she says. “Canada is such a great country and we are so lucky to be here. When you see all the political stuff going on elsewhere, it makes you appreciate where you live.”