Jane Channell is in a bit of a strange spot. She’s just come off a rookie season spent rocketing down icy slopes and rocketing up the skeleton World Cup rankings, but all anyone wants to talk about is that darn broom.
“That’s all that people were messaging me about for the next while,” Channell said with a laugh when the North Shore News caught up with her last week. “And even now I still get people saying, ‘Oh you’re the one that got hit with the broom.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that was me.’”
So let’s get the broom out of the way — which is what should have happened in the first place. The North Vancouver native was just starting a run at a World Cup skeleton event in Igls, Austria, in early February when a track worker dropped a broom onto the icy chute, right in Channell’s path.
“It happened so quick,” she said. “The track was clear and when I was coming out of the grooves it put me in the wrong direction so I was leaning to my right and then all of a sudden this broom comes out of nowhere. It was just reaction time. It wasn’t like I had time to plan what I was going to do. It definitely took me by surprise. It was a big shock but after it got me I thought to myself I still have a run to do, so I just refocused and made my way down the track as best I could.”
The video went viral and soon Channell was ending up as light-hearted chuckle fodder at the end of sportscasts around the world.
What’s even more ridiculous is that it wasn’t even the first time Channell had hit something weird this season. At an earlier race held in St. Moritz, Channell blasted into a stick that fell onto the track.
“It was lying straight across the track,” she said. “It wasn’t like I could steer around it or anything so I just ended up running over it. I knew it wasn’t big enough to do any damage to me. Maybe my sled and the runners, but there was nothing I could have done about that.”
You’d think, given Channell’s experiences, that skeleton racers smack into stuff all the time. But that is not the case at all.
“It’s rare to hit anything on the track,” she said. “It never really happens.”
What was obscured in all the branch-and-broom-related news was the results Channell was putting up on her first try at the sport’s top circuit. St. Moritz was only the fourth World Cup race of her career but she cracked the top 10, finishing seventh (she got to re-do her branch-interrupted run — “I wasn’t really having the best of runs leading up to hitting it. It was like, ‘yay, someone’s looking down.’ I shouldn’t be happy that I hit something, but out of any run it was a good run to hit something on,” she said).
She also finished seventh in Igls and then scored her big breakthrough at the World Championships held March 6 in Winterberg, Germany, where she finished fourth, just 0.06 seconds off the podium.
“I was extremely happy with it,” she said of her World Championship showing. “To be able to put everything together for the big race at the end of the season was really exciting for me. . . . Going into worlds I had confidence, which is important when you slide. I used the start to my advantage and just focused on that and then let my sled do the work the rest of the way down the track.”
This season is now over but Channell, 26, is hoping that more big results will come in the next few years as she sets her sights on the 2018 Olympics in South Korea. Like many sliding athletes, she started out in other sports, competing in soccer, basketball and track and field at Handsworth secondary. Channell continued her sprinting career at Simon Fraser University but always had the sliding sports in the back of her mind. After graduating with a bachelor of science degree in physical geography Channell went to a Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton identification camp where she was told to gain some weight for a bobsleigh career.
“They wanted me to put on 30 pounds. I said no,” she said with a laugh. “Skeleton was what I always wanted to do.”
To hear Channell describe the sport, it’s no wonder she’s enthralled with skeleton.
“What is it like? Oh my gosh, it’s like nothing else,” she said. “It’s like you’re flying down a giant ice slide hitting upwards of 130 kilometres, sometimes 140 kilometres per hour with your face an inch off the ice — sometimes dragging on the ice. . . . It’s like sliding headfirst on a glorified cookie sheet down a giant ice slope.”
Like several other high-speed sports, the irony of skeleton is that the wilder the ride gets, the more you need to relax.
“That’s what I always have to tell myself,” she said. “Your sled will respond to you if you’re relaxed or if you’re tense. The more relaxed you are on your sled, the more your sled will work for you rather than against you.”
Channell, who now lives in Calgary, was up in Whistler last week to help promote the 2010 Olympic track as a venue for future events. Canada announced bids to host World Cup events starting as early as next season as well as the World Championships in 2019. The winning bids will be announced this summer.
“It’d be unreal to have it back on the World Cup, let alone having it back for world championships,” Channell said of the track where she was first introduced to the sport.
So is Channell hoping she’ll have finally left the broom behind her by the time the world comes back to Whistler to compete?
“I am,” she said with a laugh. “But in light of it I guess it has brought more attention to the sport itself so kind of any attention for such an unknown sport is good attention. It brings more public awareness and intrigue to it. As unfortunate as it was, you have to take the good with it too.”
