DAEGWALLYEONG, South Korea — Katie Uhlaender was stepping to the line to begin hurtling face first down an icy track at 75 mph. It was Friday night and the first skeleton heat of her fourth and possibly final Olympics. Her last four years had been dramatic and traumatic: finding her best friend dead, nearly dying from an auto-immune illness, five surgeries, almost but not quite getting a Sochi bronze medal four years after the race due to the Russian doping scandal. She called it “a roller coaster” and the ride got extra bouncy here.
With 30 seconds to her start, she looked up to get cues from her coaches. And there was her mom. She had not seen Karen Uhlaender, who had flown out from her home in Colorado, in more than four years. They had not spoken in four years. They’d had, Uhlaender said, “a bit of a falling out.”
“A burst of emotion hit me,” said the 33-year-old Colorado native and American skeleton sliding legend. “I saw nothing but love but it was a lot to take in at that moment.”
It wasn’t Uhlaender’s best Olympic showing. That would have been four years ago at the Sochi Olympics, when she finished fourth, a mere four-hundredths of second behind Russian bronze medalist Elena Nikitina. She finished the fourth heat on Saturday , Great Britain’s Lizzy Arnold. Germany’s Jacqueline Loelling won silver, followed by Great Britain’s Laura Deas for bronze, capping a very good Olympic day for England.
Uhlaender had tears in her eyes Friday night but they weren’t because of lost milliseconds. She might have skidded a bit coming out of turn seven in her last heat, but that wasn’t causing the upswell of emotion. There was her cheering section, a rowdy gallery of friends and family, including the mother of Steve Holcombe, a gold-medal bobsledder and Uhlaender’s best friend. She had at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid last May.
There were the memories from her near-death illness in late 2016. There were the surgeries — a dozen in 12 years to ankles, knees and hips and none, amazingly, from injuries sustained while sliding on her belly at highway speeds. There was her self-funded push to her fourth Olympics. The week has been a cascade of grief and gratefulness, love and sorrow.
“I was crying at the start house. I think I’ve been crying all week if we are going to honest. I just looked at my coaches and said like why do I have to be so human. Can you take the feels away please,” she said, her red-dyed hair spilling from a battered helmet perched high like a crown. “Because you can’t control grief and you can’t control your desires and your wants sometimes and I was just letting myself cry and letting myself feel it.”
Last fall, when Nikitina was implicated in a doping scandal and the International Olympic Committee stripped her bronze, it looked like Uhlaender would be awarded her first Olympic medal. But a few weeks ago the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned Nikitina’s ban, along with 27 other Russian athletes and reinstated their Sochi results.
But Uhlaender isn’t bitter about that.
“Man thatap the crazy thing. Thatap what I’ve been trying to accomplish over the last year just realizing that races don’t define you,” she said.
That wisdom comes from her deathbed. She had pretty much accepted death in November 2016 and was ready to surrender as an auto-immune disease ravaged her body.
“I just remember being at peace and thinking I’ve lived a great life. I wasn’t thinking I’m a three-time Olympian or I’ve done this or I’ve done that,” she said. “I was literally thinking of the people I’ve loved and the people who love me. The experiences I had standing on top of mountain about to rip a peak and itap totally quiet. I think about all the moments. It wasn’t the results, it was the moments going down the track when my stomach is my throat and I just loved life. Whether that bronze is mine or not, thatap not what itap about. I think itap an opportunity to seize the moment and thatap what I tried to do here. I think I want to walk away knowing that I have tons of people that have loved me; that have supported me and the journey is crazy.”
On Saturday, she still hadn’t talked to her mom. She isn’t even sure where her mom lives in Colorado. She blew her mom a kiss from the starting line on Friday night, but hadn’t seen her since. She said she is ready to forgive and felt confident that her mom, traveling so many thousands of miles to see her, was ready to do so too.
But she said she couldn’t imagine doing this again.
“To go another four years sounds crazy,” she said, noting how she has a lot of debt from “investing in this one moment,” including buying her own sled, speed suit and helmet while funding her own training and travel through her work with a neurology clinic helping teach people about concussions and brain awareness, a subject that she knows well. “I don’t know how to do it again for four years and be almost 40. I don’t know.”
She’s quick to dispel any notion of suffering though.
“I don’t call it sacrifice,” she said. “Itap a privilege and a choice to represent my country and everyone that helped me get here.”
