SALT LAKE CITY — In the middle of summer, without a snowflake in sight, a group of athletes in Salt Lake City were already thinking about winter.
For Logan resident Emma Reeves, the opportunity came unexpectedly.
“My coach was like, ‘Well, if you’re not going to continue in track, like, you should do bobsled,'” Reeves said.
Reeves, who ran track at Utah State University, admitted she didn’t know much about the sport at first.
“The only thing I really knew about bobsled was ‘Cool Runnings,’ and then (I) started to learn more,” she said. “I was interested.”
She was one of several athletes who came out to the Slide to Glory combine at the University of Utah’s McCarthey Family Track and Field Complex on Saturday morning. It was a sort of tryout for a chance to make the USA Bobsled and Skeleton team.
Most bobsled and skeleton athletes come from other sports. That’s something Team USA head coach Chris Fogt knows personally.
“So I was recruited — I was a track athlete at Utah Valley University,” Fogt said.
Fogt, who grew up in Utah and lives in Highland, went on to compete in three Winter Olympics. Now, he’s helping the next generation chase the same dream.
“So, things we look for for a bobsledder: first, you have to be a little bit crazy because you’re gonna slide down a hill or (on a) skeleton at 90 mph,” Fogt said with a laugh. “But on top of that, some of the things we want is really speed, power and strength. So really, that hybrid athlete that can run fast but is also strong and can jump high, too.”
Athletes jumped, ran and pushed sleds with weights so they could be timed and judged on distance.
With the 2034 Winter Olympics returning to Salt Lake City in less than nine years, an athlete from these tryouts just might end up competing in those Games.
“We host it here in Utah every single year because we really want the Utah athletes to come out,” Fogt said. “We’re not biased, but being from Utah myself, I would love to see as many Utah athletes at the Games in 2030 and at our home Games in 2034, which we are so excited about.”
Idaho resident Isabella Burnett, a high school senior and state champion, is chasing that possibility.
“I want to give everything that I’ve got, and I want to be on the big stage. I want to perform, do what I love,” Burnett said.
She knows the Olympics would be the ultimate goal.
“It would honestly just be amazing,” she said, “(to) represent USA as, like, literally, one of their athletes. That’s just, like, it’s just an amazing thing.”
For Reeves, Burnett and the others, the path won’t be easy. But they said the chance to wear red, white and blue and maybe slide toward Olympic glory in Salt Lake City is worth every step.
“My family is all from here, so that would be super cool,” Reeves said.
The two top-performing male and female athletes will be flown to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., for a rookie camp to test their skills on ice.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
