Avenue Magazine Calgary

A medal contender at this month’s Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, 29-year-old Mellisa Hollingsworth will try and garner what has elluded any Canadian athlete at an Olympics on home soil: a gold medal.

Speeding down a track of ice at speeds exceeding 140 kilometres an hour, the local, national and international skeleton champion will dive head-first — literally — for a chance to become part of the winter sports legend.

“What athlete doesn’t dream of standing on top of the podium hearing ‘O Canada,’ watching the Maple Leaf rise? That’s the ultimate goal,” she says.

With a proud skeleton pedigree and lineage to draw from (cousin, and fellow Calgarian, Ryan Davenport is a two-time world champion), Hollingsworth’s rise nearly ended before it even had a chance to sprint out of the gate. After a quick start and ascent in the national ranks in the late 1990s, Hollingsworth all but quit the sport after failing to make the Olympic team in 2002. “I had the wrong attitude then,” she says. “I was simply chasing the dream and title of Olympian. You can’t do that, or it’ll backfire.”

Reassessing goals and priorities meant a shift in her camp, and with a new stable of supporters, Hollingsworth slid her way to a bronze medal at the 2006 Torino Games, making her the first Canadian to ever win an Olympic medal in skeleton.

While a top podium finish is just a couple of hard-fought slides away in Whistler, Hollingsworth envisions a not-so-distant future, free of much of her daily velocity and unyielding regimen.

“I grew up on a farm, and I’d like to get back there again,” she says, smiling. “I’m an Alberta country girl, through and through.”

For those of us who have yet to be initiated, explain the sport of skeleton.

Going head-first on your stomach [on a custom sled] down the bobsleigh track, at over 140 kilometres an hour.

How did you get involved in a crazy sport like that?

I was 15 when I was introduced to it by my cousin, world champion Ryan Davenport. I was doing my normal high school sports, and we talked about it, and he thought I would be a good fit for the sport, and he was right. Three months later, after I earned my [skeleton] licence, I won the Canadian championship, that’s what really sparked my love for it.

How much do the skeleton sleds cost?

It all depends on the supply and demand. If you are on the list to buy a Davenport sled [made by my cousin Ryan], it will cost about $3,500. Runners cost about $1,100 a pair, and they can be wrecked in one run down the track. But not everyone is able to get on the Davenport list, so used sleds can go for whatever people are willing to pay, and sometimes the bidding wars are ridiculous! I would assume if I wanted to sell my current sled right now, I could probably get toward $10,000 for it.