Plummeting headfirst to glory
18th August, 2009, in Sport
UNUSUAL SPORT. UNUSUAL NAME. SILICONCOACH AMBASSADOR TIONETTE STODDARD IS SHAPING UP TO BE ONE OF NEW ZEALAND’S BEST CHANCES OF A MEDAL AT NEXT YEAR’S WINTER OLYMPICS IN THE HELTERSKELTER SPORT OF SKELETON RACING.
By Naomi Arnold. Photos Sandra Mu/Getty images.
Article courtesy of Skysport Magazines
From an armchair it looks insane. Skeleton is not an Olympic sport many Kiwis would be familiar with, but it is one of the most raw and exciting to watch: an athlete, a sled, a running start and a couple of minutes to zoom to the bottom of an icy bobsleigh track at speeds reaching 130km/h. Headfirst.
At the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year, those few minutes will be the culmination of six years of training for New Zealand's number-one skeleton racer Tionette Stoddard.
In 2006 she missed out on the Olympics by one point due to a crash early in the season. But with a current ranking of 13th in the world, she's giving it her all this year with the ultimate goal of an Olympic podium finish.
Based in Dunedin and training at the New Zealand Academy of Sport, the 34- year-old is a consummate sportswoman, with a diverse competitive background in rugby, bobsleigh and weightlifting.
She's currently performing at the highest level in skeleton, placing 12th at February's FIBT World Cup and seventh at the Skeleton World Cup in January 2008. She won a first at the America's Cup races in Lake Placid in April, the first time a Kiwi female skeleton racer has done so, and was one of only 10 New Zealand athletes to be granted an Olympic Solidarity Scholarship this year.
Stoddard was raised in Australia, but New Zealand is her home by choice. She moved here in 2005 with her Kiwi husband and coach, Winter Olympian Angus Ross, and chose skeleton racing after injury set her sporting career on a different track.
Stoddard was playing rugby for Queensland in August 2003 when she injured her knee, damaging her ACL, bone and cartilage so dramatically that her doctor told her she should only ever run in a straight line again.
Rugby was out. But Stoddard was not. After eight weeks on crutches, operations and months of rehabilitation, she hunted around for a sport in which she could succeed.
"I still had a fire in my belly and it was at that time that I started seeing Angus," she says. "He's a very good coach and he taught me to have good confidence in my ability. He said, ‘Look, I think you can do something really special, so don't worry about the rugby, we'll find you another sport'.
"I'd done a season of bobsleigh, but ultimately was too small to be world-class, so we thought skeleton might be another option."
Merely watching skeleton is enough to make you hold your breath. Sleds have no steering or brakes, and athletes must use minute shifts of bodyweight, negotiating hairpin turns and straightaways to find the best line and steer through. The gravitational force of those sharp turns - up to 5Gs - is comparable to that endured by space shuttle astronauts on re-entry.
Athletes hurtle down the track with their faces and toes millimeters from the ice and the only way to stop is to run out of slope. Or crash.
Athletes hurtle down the track with their faces and toes millimetres from the ice and the only way to stop is to run out of slope. Or crash.
Which begs the obvious question: has she had any spectacular wipe-outs?
"In the first couple of seasons when I was just learning I was coming off my sled a lot and I felt a little bit like one of the gimps in the field. It was a bit naive of me, but I was quite keen to try this sport and I knew the calibre of some of the athletes who did it. I thought well, if they can do it I can as well. But I went really easy when you don't really know what you're doing to come off your sled."
She doesn't come off so much anymore. Stoddard has sprint, strength and sliding coaches, and likes to be involved in every aspect of her training. She uses video analysis, with Dunedin company Silicon Coach studying her starts and form on the sled, measuring biomechanics and modifying her movements to gain maximum power and momentum from the race's all-important start, or ‘push'.
Push times are strongly related to overall performance. Spotters scouting for young skeleton talent look for fast sprinters, and Stoddard's push is one of the best in the business; at the last World Cup she had the third-fastest in the field.
That gives her confidence for Vancouver, though by racing for New Zealand she's at a slight disadvantage. Many of her competitors train on their home tracks and thus have considerably more experience on the ice. She's also a relative newcomer to the sport, with just five competitive seasons under her belt compared to 15 years for some of her competitors. But that doesn't faze her.
"The Americans, the Swiss, the Germans - they all have their own home tracks, and whilst we can go overseas and gain access to the tracks it's really expensive. We will never, ever have as many runs down tracks as some of those athletes from the bigger nations have. They're always going to have more driving time than me, but I'm a better athlete than a lot of them and that's starting to show through with the push now."
She says innovation is one method of overcoming the handicap of training in a country that doesn't have a single bobsleigh track, and she concentrates on quality, focused preparation.
"I try and get to the tracks as early as I can, the day the track opens. I spend as much time overseas as possible. Last year I was away for five months, and then I came home for three weeks and went away for another month just to get as much time on tracks as I possibly could. Equipment plays a big role, so I'm also trying to make sure that I've got access to competitive equipment and that I've got good aerodynamics.
"I visualise a lot, I watch a lot of footage of tracks to try and improve the number of times I've seen what a track looks like. And when you knock some of these people off on race day, you realise they are not unbeatable and it's a huge boost to your confidence when you do. They're just competitors at the end of the day and there are so many variables on race day that you can only control what you do."
That's one of the things she likes about skeleton. It's completely individual: just her and the ice. "It just comes down to you once you're on the sled.
You can only rely on yourself, you're totally focused on what you're doing, it's quiet inside your helmet and you're just trying to go as fast as you can." After the camaraderie of rugby she found skeleton a bit isolating at first, but believes working on her knee rehabilitation also made her mentally stronger.
"I had to spend a lot of time training on my own and that gave me a lot of thinking time and lots of fuel for motivation. Racing overseas, you feel a little bit lonely sometimes being away from friends and family. But once you get to know the other athletes on the circuit and you're just getting on with your job, enjoying what you're doing and keeping in touch with people from home, it doesn't feel that isolating really.
"In my first two seasons I actually came home from the end of the season thinking, ‘I'm not sure if I want to do that again'. But something spurred me on - I felt challenged. The last two seasons I've come home thinking I can't wait to get back into it, whatever it takes, that's what I'm going to do. I've just been so inspired by the progress that I've made and how much I'm enjoying what I'm doing."
What are her goals for Vancouver?
"I want to beat everybody. There's nobody in the field that I think is unbeatable, and there are probably only a couple of names in the field who I haven't beaten yet. I feel like it's only a matter of time and that gives me confidence." Though only competing in the sport for five years, Stoddard feels her slightly roundabout route into skeleton has been an advantage, and she brings different strengths and experience to her racing. "I feel as though I've grown heaps as a person. Certainly I have a lot more confidence in my abilities, and I think that allows you to share that with other people and help them have confidence in themselves as well. I've learnt the power of positive thinking and believing, problem solving, coping strategies, travel and independence overseas.
They're things that you can pass on to other people in any area of work. I'd really like to use some of the skills I've developed and the experiences I've had to put back as well, when this is all finished."
Focused, confident and completely committed to her sport: you get the feeling that Stoddard won't be finished for a while yet
I want to beat everybody. There's nobody in the field that I think
is unbeatable, and there are probably only a couple of names in the
field who I haven't beaten yet.