Guard athletes compete for chance at Winter Olympics

Photo By Sgt. 1st Class Jon Soucy | Sgt. Courtney Zablocki, a personnel specialist with the Colorado Army National Guard and member of the Guard's Outstanding Athlete Program, prepares for a training run in the luge at the Lake Placid Olympic Sports Complex in Lake Placid, N.Y., Thursday, Oct. 15, 2009. Zablocki, who competed in the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics, will be competing for a slot on the 2010 U.S. Winter Olympic Team.  

LAKE PLACID, NY, UNITED STATES

10.19.2009

Story by Sgt. 1st Class Jon Soucy 

National Guard Bureau

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — The 2010 Winter Olympics are a few shorts months away, and several Army National Guard Soldiers are currently competing for slots on the bobsled and luge teams.

The Soldiers, Sgts. Mike Kohn, Shauna Rohbock, Jeremy White, Courtney Zablocki and Pfc. John Napier are all members of the National Guard's Outstanding Athlete Program, which brings Guard members on active duty to train and compete in their chosen sport.

Over the next few weeks, they will compete in 10 races on a variety of tracks to determine who will go to the Olympics. The Olympic team will be announced in January.

For the bobsled event, drivers of the sled are awarded points based on where they finish in each of the trials, which recently started here at the Olympic Sports Complex and will move to the track at Park City, Utah, this week.

"It's kind of like NASCAR racing or auto racing where you accumulate points," said Kohn, an infantryman from the Virginia ARNG, who competes in both the four- and two-man bobsled events. "The points are what determine who will make the Olympic team."

For Kohn, who earned the bronze medal in the four-man bobsled event at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, the pressure is on to earn more points in coming races.

"We're halfway done [with the trials], and I think I'm sitting in third place right now," he said. "I've got my work cut out for me. I've done it before, though."

But for others, there isn't as much pressure. For Rohbock, a personnel specialist in the Utah ARNG and one of the top female bobsledders in the world, this recent round of races mean additional time to train and work out the kinks.

"I took second at the world championships and according to our criteria I get a bye onto the team — the national team — not the Olympic team," she said, adding that races in the coming weeks will count toward a slot on the Olympic team.

But for now, she said, it's nice to race without that pressure.

"During these team trials, I'm just trying to get my feel back as a driver," said Rohbock. "... these other people are feeling the pressure and they've only been down the ice like 10 runs and then they have to race and that's a little nerve racking when you haven't been on it all summer long."

For Zablocki, who competes in the luge event, the races here are a prep for Park City, which will determine who will compete in the luge in the World Cup, which will then determine who goes to the Olympics.

"I'm feeling really good," said Zablocki, after her runs at Lake Placid. "I was happy with the times I had so far. I'm feeling comfortable ... I'm just going into next week really happy and giving it my all."

And for Zablocki, like Rohbock, Lake Placid was a chance to get back into a groove with the equipment.

"This is just training, getting ready to race and making sure your equipment is ready to go and you're comfortable on it," said Zablocki. "For my first run today things were really different. My sled was a lot more steerable than normal, the ice is harder, I don't have as much grip because I have different [runners] on today so a lot of it was, 'OK, how does my sled work?'"

Rohbock has taken notice of some of the run times of other bobsledders.

"The start record [for the women's bobsled event] here was 54.4 [seconds] and it was set by a couple of Canadian girls that are pretty good pushers," said Rohbock, adding that the course is about a mile in length. That record was recently broken, she said, by a team that ran the course in 47 seconds and then were able to drop that down to 46 seconds.

"That's insane," said Rohbock. "That's very fast, so we have a lot of great pushers coming up. It's good to know going into the season as a driver that you have some good brakemen behind you, especially going into an Olympic year."

And for Rohbock, traveling down the track at those speeds is one of the appeals of the sport.

"Sometimes when you can see ahead of you and you're in this enormous curve and you're driving this bobsled with all this weight and all these G-forces and everything that is included in that, sometimes you're just like 'this is so cool,'" said Rohbock. "You're going down the track and sometimes you're just like, 'This is an awesome feeling. I wish everybody could feel this.'"

For Kohn, traveling fast makes for an easier run.

"I prefer the faster ones; there is less thinking involved then," he said. "If you just do it and don't think about it it's a little more natural."

And for Zablocki, the speeds she travels down the ice on the luge sled are similar, though the track is a bit shorter.

"Here, we're hitting upper 60s," she said. "My fastest speed that I've been clocked at has been 86 mph, so we're pretty quick speeding down these icy shoots and it can get a little nerve-racking."

But that is part of the challenge. "It's a blast," said Zablocki. "You just kind of have to put it in the back of your mind and just go."

• Date Taken: 10.19.2009
• Date Posted: 10.19.2009 12:35
• Story ID: 40330
• Location: LAKE PLACID, NY, US