Skeleton star Kimberley Bos races to a special medal on a ‘crazy job’

While the German Tina Hermann slides her sled into the cushions at the end of the ice channel in Yanqing, Kimberley Bos lets out a cry. She raises her arms, clenches her fists, jumps into the air with craziness. She is sure of a medal, a historic one too. The very first for the Netherlands in a sledding sport at the Winter Games.

You had Kees Broekman (skating, 1952), Sjoukje Dijkstra (figure skating, 1960), Nicolien Sauerbreij (snowboarding, 2010) and Sjinkie Knegt (short track speed skating, 2014). pioneers. And now there’s Kimberley Bos, skeleton. She eventually comes in third, behind another German Olympic champion Hannah Neise, and the Australian Jaclyn Narracott.

“Insane”, says Bos with a bronze medal around her neck. “May I take these home with me.” The historical significance still largely escaped her. “Maybe I’ll realize it tomorrow.”

Bos had been working towards this since 2013, when she first encountered bobsledding. She would make a few attempts to make it to the top, but she soon moved on to the skeleton – she was too light to excel in the bobsleigh, weighed 10 kilos less than the average competitor.

Once she started working on the skeleton, she improved a little every year, her sports experience became more professional, she mastered steering in addition to starting, better results, more sponsors and other financial support and she was able to work in the restaurant of exchange top sports center Papendal for full-time training and rest if necessary.

In 2018 she became the first Dutch Olympic participant ever in the skeleton, finishing eighth in Pyeongchang. Last year she finished third in the World Cup, this season she won it. She also became European champion.

Notebook with sixteen curves

The secret to her extraordinary achievement was in a notebook. In it Bos wrote down all experiences with the brand new track last week and earlier this year, when she was allowed to train in China during a test event. It contained drawings of all sixteen curves, with a sketch of the ideal line to go through them as best as possible. All on paper, Bos did not trust digital storage because of Chinese espionage practices.

The track was the key to Olympic medal. Designed like a flying Chinese dragon soaring against the mountainside, the course from the valley of Yanqing offers an impressive sight. But for skeleton players it’s just “a crazy job”, Bos said last week. One in which it is difficult to get a rhythm. Left-right, left-right, left-right, left-right, right four times in a row, then left four times, it’s anything but smooth. A mistake is made quickly, and can immediately cost a second, a gaping hole in a sport where tenths, or hundredths of a second.

Bos and her competitors were able to make a total of about fifty descents on the Olympic track in recent months; forty during the test event at the end of last year and last week according to the regulations another ten. The Chinese participants did it tenfold. Nevertheless, they ended up in the rear.

Bos’ plan to set up four constant descents was thrown into the trash after her first descent on Friday. She made three big steering errors in the top part of the track, which resulted in a lot of time loss and finished tenth.

Bos started her advance that same day. In the second run, she corrected her mistakes and climbed to sixth place. On Saturday, her third descent into the lightning-fast ice channel, in which almost everyone was faster than the day before, went very well. Bos started perfectly and despite a few small mistakes at the end she set a time that raised her to fourth place.

It came down to the last run. Bos had said all season about pressure that it didn’t bother her. She focused on good sledding, always wanted to improve. The fact that many Dutch journalists had traveled especially for her to the job in the hard-to-reach Yanqing did not bother her. “I like that there is more attention for my sport,” she said in the run-up to the game. “But other than that, I try to do it as little as possible.”

In her last run, she showed that it was not just a story for the stage. She was only slightly slower than her third run, but a lot faster than the women sliding down in front of her. She hurtled down at more than 127 kilometers per hour. At such speeds, Bos can’t see more than 15 meters ahead, but her senses continued to send the right signals to her brain, so that it could tell her shoulders and knees to find the best possible line. She launched herself from bend to bend, managed to stay away from the walls and thus wrote Dutch sports history.

This was also a reward for her coach Kristan Bromley. The British four-time world champion, nicknamed ‘Dr. Ice’ because of his background as an aerospace engineer, was able to work almost anywhere in the world in 2016 because his home-built sleds are regarded as the very best in the sport.

He consciously chose to coach Bos because he thought she was a natural talent, and he recognized her lonely struggle from his own career as a skeleton player. Together against the superpowers in sport, that seemed like a nice adventure. Bromley competed in four Olympics, but never won a medal. His pupil does now.