Although it’s been quite an emotional season, I’ve been able to carry some positivity through my last few races and into the final stretch of 2011/2012. As it now stands, I’m 56 points away from qualifying for World Championships. It’s going to be a challenging deficit to make up, but I have two races on [...]
Skeleton is such a polarizing sport. At the end of the day, it’s tempting to categorize our performance as either great or shit, but rarely anything in between. Even a decent result can turn ugly when our inner voice convinces us how bad we suck. Igls was certainly a bad race for me, the worst [...]
As a skeleton athlete, the hardest thing I’ve had to learn is patience. Patience with sliding, training, and mostly with the development process. There are no shortcuts. Too often I see athletes enter our program expecting to make the Olympic team in 4 years. This idea has even been encouraged within our development program, which [...]
In a recent article on CNN, former Navy SEAL Chris Heben discusses how SEALs live by an unspoken code – “Be a quiet professional”. Like most young men, there was a time in my early twenties when I wondered if I had the will and determination to join the SEALs. I never actually considered enlisting, [...]
Today I’m breathing new life into SliderGuide, the web magazine I built for poking fun at the sliding sports. Since 2007 the site has gone through several iterations. Unfortunately each one pushed it further away from what it was best at —, making people laugh and occasionally pissing people off. From my welcome message in [...]
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is “How do I get started in skeleton”? If you’ve ever had the desire to slide headfirst down an ice track at 85mph with your chin two inches from the ice, this is the post for you! I’m going to cover your first year of sliding [...]
This morning, 21-year old Georgian Luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili was killed on the track in Whistler. Rest in peace, Nodar. A men’s Olympic luger from the country of Georgia died Friday after a high-speed crash on a track that is the world’s fastest and has raised safety concerns among competitors. A tearful IOC president Jacques [...]