On heels of skeleton world title, Uhlaender sets sites on weightlifting
Fifteen U.S. female weightlifters will compete Sunday in Columbus, Ohio, for two slots at the summer London Olympics.
Katie Uhlaender enters the Olympic trials ranked 15th. It will be the fourth weightlifting competition of her life. She needs to add more than 60 pounds to her two-lift qualifying total to match the top women.
But it would be folly to count out Uhlaender on numbers alone.
She did, after all, win a world championship three days ago in a sport in which guts and will matter as much as strength and speed.
By winning her first skeleton world title Friday in Lake Placid, N.Y., Uhlaender has posted one of the biggest upsets in Olympic sports this year.
She carried a World Cup rank- ing of 11th into worlds.
“I would not rule her out by any means,” U.S. skeleton head coach Tuffy Latour says of Uhlaender’s chances at the weightlifting trials, “especially with the adrenaline rush she’s getting off this world championships — and the confidence.”
The skeleton victory gave Uhlaender, a two-time Winter Olympian, a full complement of world medals (she won bronze in 2007 and silver in 2008) and spotlighted her attempt to also qualify for a Summer Olympics.
“I’ve always wanted to be an all-around athlete,” says Uhlaender, 27, the daughter of late major league outfielder Ted Uhlaender. “Skeleton is extreme. It incorporates the track aspect of things. And I already did weightlifting for skeleton. So it was just another opportunity that I saw, and I’m going for it.”
Uhlaender does nothing at half speed. Her skeleton coaches would hold their collective breath when every season ended, knowing the Colorado resident likely was pushing limits somewhere on skis, a snowboard or a snowmobile.
Her love for the extreme led to several injuries, the most serious the shattered kneecap she suffered while snowmobiling near Vail in April 2009. The injury required multiple surgeries.
Despite what her successes at worlds in 2007 and 2008 might have portended, she finished 11th in the 2010 Olympics.
“I basically threw away an Olympic medal by getting on that snowmobile,” she says.
After the Vancouver Games, weighed down by her Olympic finish and the 2009 death of her father, she decided to fill her free time with weightlifting.
She calls her summer-winter pursuit illogical. But Latour says, “This is perfect” for Uhlaender, who “needs to be doing something all the time.”
While traveling around Europe on the skeleton tour, she lifted weights before and after training runs and races. She sent video to USA Weightlifting coaches to critique.
“It is a balancing act, and I do get overwhelmed,” she says, recalling when she had to lift outside in a snowstorm (the U.S. skeleton team brings its own weights on tour) because there was no gym available.
She won her first weightlifting competition, a regional event in the summer of 2010. She finished third in the national championships in the 63-kilogram (138.6-pound) weight class in the summer of 2011. She qualified for the Olympic trials in early December with a second-place finish in the American Open at 58 kilos (127.6 pounds).
“She’s just a tremendous athlete,” said Kyle Pierce, head coach of USA Weightlifting’s High Performance Center at Lsu-shreveport. “There’s not too many people that could jump in the sport that quick and rise that rapidly.”
Uhlaender, who stands 5-3, will try to keep rising Sunday, nine days after winning a world title while sliding headfirst down an icy track. “I’m the underdog,” she says. “But I would rather walk away saying, ‘I gave it my all’ than ‘I don’t know what would have happened.’ ”