LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Sometime this morning, while her baby is fast asleep on the other side of the world, American skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace will find a quiet spot to be alone.
She’ll pray. She’ll think of her husband and family. And then her mind will turn to 10-month-old Lacee, her first child.
“Now I know why I’m out here,” Pikus-Pace said. “If I’m going to be away from my family and from her, it has to be for a darn good reason.”
Oh, there’s a darn good reason: the lure of Olympic gold, the medal she never got a chance to race for in 2006, the prize that has brought her back to the track.
It’s an obsession, really, and it resumes today when a new World Cup season begins in Winterberg, Germany.
Pikus-Pace missed last year’s World Cup season because she was pregnant with Lacee, but now, fitter and perhaps stronger than ever, the 2007 world champion from Eagle Mountain, Utah, is eager to try and reclaim her perch atop the sport.
“I don’t want to focus on results, not yet. I want to get comfortable on my sled again,” Pikus-Pace said. “But a race is a race and I won’t let you beat me at Monopoly, so why should I let you beat me out here?”
