BARRHEAD-Cue the training montage.
As a bobsleigh athlete on the national team who has competed for Canada on the world stage, including the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics it is clear that Barrhead native Melissa Lotholz knows a thing or two about training. Lotholz finished in seventh place along with fellow Albertan Christine De Brun. Lotholz was her brakeman.
Lotholz is entering her seventh season on the national team. The first four was as brakeman mostly for Kaillie Humphries. Over that time, in addition to her Olympic appearance, she would accumulate 17 World Cup medals, including two World Championship silver medals. The 2020-21 season will mark her third as part of the development team as she attempts to transition from the back seat to the front, to become a pilot.
However, even she was surprised when she performed so well at the Bobsleigh Canada's testing camp, in early October, at the Ice House.
"I pushed better than ever before. I tied with my teammate [Cynthia Appiah] for the fastest driver's push of the day [4/100ths off the Canadian record] and the second-fastest overall female push of the day," Lotholz said, from Whistler, B.C. where she is training with the rest of the Canadian Bobsleigh Team. "It was a really good day and a great way to start the season."
One of the reasons why she was surprised at the result is that similar to the character Rocky Balboa, in Rocky IV, Lotholz improvised much of her training regime using readily available items on her family's farm.
The testing camp was in the first half of a nearly month-long training session at the Ice House.
From there the entire national squad, including luge and skeleton moved to Whistler to begin sliding training.
"Everything has been up in the air, especially because of the changes [restrictions] to international travel," Lotholz said, adding in a normal year they would have already been on the ice and in the sled since mid-October.
The Whistler Sliding Centre delayed putting in the ice, due to the cancellation of some sliding events, including one slated for its own track in February. The reason being, Canada's 14-day quarantine for all foreign athletes.
Nor is it the only event that has been cancelled or postponed. In bobsleigh, the sport's international governing body has cancelled all of its North America Cup races and as well as any Word Cup races in North America. As an up and coming pilot, Lotholz was scheduled to compete mainly on the North American Cup, which is a development circuit.
As a result of cancelling the North American stops on the World Cup circuit conduct an abridged schedule and doubling the number of events at each location to cut down the travel.
Lotholz noted that it is unlikely that she would see any time on the World Cup circuit, as a driver on the development team but in the short term, it does mean that the entire Canadian bobsleigh contingent will remain in Whistler for the foreseeable future.
Which is something she welcomes.
"It has been great to work with all the national team coaches because there are that many more eyes on the track," Lotholz said.
She said as a new driver if one was going to be at any track for an extended period of time, Whistler would be her choice.
"It is a very technical track and it challenges you consistently," Lotholz said.
And she said if she ever starts to get complacent about practising on just one track, it takes only a change of weather to change the conditions drastically.
"As the weather gets colder, it is going to become a much quicker track and the faster you go the more likely you are going to make mistakes," Lotholz said, adding during a Nov. 4 training session she eclipsed the 140 km/h barrier. "At this time of year, that is pretty good but it's only going to get faster."
And so far, for this season, she is pleased with how she is progressing, considering she is still new to the front seat.
"Any time you learn a new skill you have good days and others where you say 'I have no idea what I am doing and what just happened," she said. "As long as the number of good days keeps going up and the bad days keeps decreasing that's all that matters."
Lotholz hopes once the season gets started in earnest that she will also have an opportunity to train and compete in monobob. In 2018, the International Olympic Committee announced that the discipline would be added as an official sport starting at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games.
The only catch being is currently the Canadian team does not have any monobobs.
"They have been ordered and are being built by a manufacturer in Germany and from what we have seen on social media some of the sleds are done," she said. "I can't wait to drive one because, in theory, they drive differently than the ones we have used in competition."
In preparation, partly for the new discipline, Canada hired a new coach Elfje Willemsen, a Belgian bobsled pilot who retired last year, after 12 years of competing on the international circuit. Willemsen tested the monobobs on the track in Winterberg, Germany.
Unfortunately, because of the coronavirus and travel restrictions, Willemsen is still in Belgium. Nor was she the only coach to have issues coming into Canada.
"When we were doing our testing camp, almost all of our coaches were in quarantine," Lotholz said, noting Bobsleigh Canada's head coach is Todd Hays, is an American and driving coach Graham Richardson is from the UK. "Thankfully because they were employed by a Canadian organization we were able to get them out of there."
When Willemsen does arrive, Lotholz said she is anxious to work with her, not only because of her knowledge in the sport but because it will be nice to have a female coach for a female sport.
"Our sport, in general, is very male orientated. In my seven years on the national team, Elfje is the first female coach we have," she said. "She is a great person and driver and I am sure she will be an awesome coach. It will be cool to have her around."
