Kate O’Brien, raised in Calgary’s Temple community, made her Olympic debut in track cycling at the 2016 games in Rio. Two years earlier, O’Brien had just missed qualifying as a bobsleigh brakeman for the Sochi games. Between 2014 and 2015, O’Brien trained in both track cycling and bobsleigh, competing in the world championships of each sport. The connecting theme? O’Brien likes to go fast.
O’Brien has always been a planner, but after sustaining a traumatic brain injury in 2017, she says she’d rather take things one day at a time. She is set to compete in the Paralympics from August 29 to September 1 at The Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, just outside of Paris.
We had a chance to talk with the Olympian-slash-Paralympian before she took off to Paris. Here’s what she had to say.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you give me a little background on where your athletic career started?
O’Brien: “I wanted to play soccer — my dad is British, so I thought it was fitting. I went with my mom to sign up at my community association in Temple, but the soccer line was so long. She played basketball in high school and pointed out that the line was shorter, if I wanted to give it a try.
And thank goodness, because I completely fell in love with that sport. Then in Grade 10, I thought my whole job in life was to become successful and go into medicine. I didn’t know if I’d have the time to play basketball, with homework and everything else, so I didn’t. That’s a pretty big regret.
Then came the end of Grade 10, and I thought I could start making time for sports again. I started in track and field, and that was relatively successful. I’m 100 per cent a sprinter, so I took up hurdles in Grade eleven and tripped on a hurdle and destroyed my knee. That was the end of my athletic career for eight years. I had a bunch of knee surgeries to fix what I had done.
We had quite late night practices with the provincial track team, and my friend on bobsleigh was missing a brakeman — the person who sits in the back and pulls the brake at the bottom. She said, ‘It’s 10 o’clock at night, but could you just stay after your practice and be my brakeman? You just push it, slide and jump in. I’ll scream at you when you pull the brakes at the bottom.’ So I got in, and we started going down the track, and then flipped sideways.
So my first bobsleigh run ever, we crashed, but when we got to the bottom I had a realization — this is my sport. It wasn’t an Olympic dream or anything. I just really liked going fast in a weird little sled down a hill.
It came up just before the 2013 Sochi Olympics that I should probably be going to the games. There were two qualified sleds, and I was the second fastest breakman. And that, funnily enough, is part of what changed me. I wasn’t doing it because I loved doing it. I was doing it because I was expected to have the success of going to these games. But of course, because I’m an injury-prone person, I got injured just before Sochi, didn’t go and felt a little bit lost after that. Do I stay in the sport, or do I not?”
Can you describe your accident in 2017? How does it affect you?
O’Brien: “I came to Calgary, and that was where the whole second part of my sporting story began. I was doing some motor-pacing on the track in Calgary. We’re a bit crazy — a motorbike leads you up to speed and then you draft your bike off of them, so you end up going roughly 75 km/h. It was the day after my birthday. My mom was there. My cousins were there. They’d never seen me train, and they were like, ‘Let’s go for ice cream after to celebrate your birthday.’
Basically, I had an equipment failure, so one of the tires on my bike blew and I hit the motorbike and fell. I’ve fallen quite a lot in track cycling, but this was just kind of the perfect fall. I broke some bones — my collar bone, which is what you have to break when you’re a cyclist – it’s like, the cool thing to do.
The main thing was I had a traumatic brain injury, so I had broken bones in my skull and had a bleed in my brain. They took me to the Foothills Medical Centre. It’s all very strange for me to say this, but I’m super lucky that I was at home in Calgary, and near the closest possible neuro centre when it happened. I had brain surgery to take out a bit of my skull, and then I was in the hospital for about three months. The whole time — I mean I don’t remember a lot of it, this is all based on stories and videos — I guess it wasn’t looking too great.
When I did come around, the doctors told me, ‘You probably won’t ever walk normally again, you won’t speak normally again.’ I still have quite bad aphasia, which means I can’t really think of the words that I’m trying to use, especially with stress or fatigue. Despite the warnings that I might never talk, let alone ride, again, I thought, ‘Well, that’s just stupid.’
It happened. I did get on a bike, but it definitely wasn’t easy coming back on the track. I was a bit of a liability, I think, for Cycling Canada. So, I did everything independently with my now-wife, who’s also a cyclist. We travelled around, she helped coach and I found a coach. I was racing my bike because I loved racing my bike, and I was back doing able-bodied competitions and getting medals after thinking that I wouldn’t even be able to to ride a bike again. A bit of a wrench was thrown into it when I was diagnosed with post traumatic epilepsy, and so that made people take a further step back.
Very similar to Sochi, I was a little bit unsure — do I keep going? The physician I work with at Foothills asked if I’d thought of trying Para. It turns out that I could, I was classifiable, and the Para team welcomed me with open arms.”
How have you been managing your training and rehabilitation in Vancouver?
O’Brien: “I have had some tricky times in the last few months — a traumatic brain injury isn’t the most stable. I’ve had some challenges with the disabilities I have, and it was my wife who suggested I get into GF Strong Rehabilitation in Vancouver. I honestly had lost hope. I really didn’t think being back on a bike for Paris was something I could do. I was having a hard time holding a plate, let alone riding a bike.
They’ve really given me my hope back, and although things have changed a bit, they’ve shown me how to overcome those things. They say, ‘You’re not making this up. This is a real thing, but you’re still an athlete and we’ll still get you back to doing things how you did.’ And so I qualified for Paris. I’ll head there, family in tow, which will be very nice after Tokyo being so lonesome.”
Can you tell me more about the moment you found out you qualified for Paris? Who told you, where were you?
O’Brien: “It actually was just an email that said, ‘You’ve been selected.’ But to be honest, it was one of the best moments. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it, even though I did what I needed to qualify, but there were still a lot of questions in my mind. So seeing that email — which was very simple, low-key and kind of a blanket email that gets sent to anyone — I was sitting in my apartment with my wife, Megan, and our son and our two dogs, and I just said, ‘Oh, so I got selected.’ She was so excited, but it probably took 15 minutes for me to process that it was real. It was a really good feeling, after my head injury and getting back on a bike for the first time.
This still exists, and I’m still Katie, and I still ride a bike.”