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The feeling when you're first on the sled,
when you dive into it, is that you're so close and you're on the ground, it's almost
like you're skimming across water. And you've just got this light sensation as the speed
starts to build, you know, you're like oh wow, I'm starting to go fast. That all changes
when you get into a corner, you get taken right up on the wall, you feel the pressure
like suck you into the sled, suck you into the ice and then shoot you out. It's almost
like you'd, you'd be on a flying like a big roller coaster or like a huge water
slide so. You know it's a nice calm feeling when you're just sitting there sliding down
the hill and there's also some chaos to it like when you really sucked into the corners
and then shot out. We've got a five day camp so we all come
together as a team and do a lot of different testing and try and really get the fine details
on our starts. We can't do any skeleton sliding training but at the start it's so
important to get that power and that drive early and down here we can test a lot of different
things so we've got a rail here that we can do push starts on and force plates in
the ground. That is able to monitor our forward acceleration on high speed cameras. We can
look at our angles and how our bodies are making that speed come about. So a lot of
technology is going into this and that's what we're down here for.
The AIS has been a, probably a phenomenal, massive contributor to the improvement and
success of skeleton for Australia. Unique challenges start with the simple fact that
there's only fifteen tracks in the world and they're all in the northern hemisphere
so we do spend five to six months every year outside of the, outside of Australia. So most
of these athletes haven't actually seen a full Australian summer for a very long time.
And then when we're actually here in the country training we don't actually have
a push track, whether it's iced or just an indoor Mondo start track. And so that provides
us with a challenge that trying to mimic the idea of running or sprinting downhill is quite
a challenge. We've got a great facility here with the
expertise from AIS biomechanics and the sprinting coaches that are part of Athletics Australia
who are all helping to contribute to skeleton potentially getting that medal around their
neck in February.
So I started in 2004 through a program with
the AIS, a talent identification program and I was doing surf lifesaving at the time and
the AIS brought us in for a testing on our thirty metre time, time over thirty metres
for the sprint and then took a team of us away and taught us how to do the sport and
from there we were sort of selected and I've been doing it for almost ten years now.
Australia's really put themselves on the map in terms of the world competition. We're
very much a contender for this Olympics. I think it's been a really interesting, really
exciting ten years because of something that was very new for Australia and we've learnt
along the way and now we're sort of reaping the benefit.