Werner ready for road to Beijing 2022
WITH just 15 weeks until the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Sydney’s Ashleigh Werner and her Australian women’s bobsleigh teammates are embracing all the nervous energy, hard work, bumps and bruises that come with preparing for the crucial Olympic-qualifying World Cup series, which starts in Europe next month.
In the Sydneysider’s longest overseas-based pre-season training stint since she switched from athletics to bobsleigh in 2017, Werner travelled to Lake Placid in the US in mid-August for intensive training, and celebrated her 29th birthday there on September 29, before flying to Germany.
“We headed out [overseas] earlier than usual to get on the ice as soon as possible,” Werner told The AJN last week, “as Lake Placid has a new indoor ice push track, so it was the perfect opportunity for us to get moving in preparation for a huge season.
“We were there with our whole crew for two months, and got some really amazing training done.”
Australia is hoping to qualify two teams for Beijing in the two-woman bobsleigh – and individual athletes in women’s monobob – via an eight-week World Cup series in Austria, Germany, Latvia and Switzerland, concluding on January 16.
The first round will be in Innsbruck, on November 20 and 21, and in a sport where you can reach a speed of more than 130kmh, every single sprint push, steering decision, and millisecond, will count.
Werner achieved several top five monobob results, including silver and bronze medal wins, in the 2019-20 world series, and was the pilot in the Australian team that came second in the 2019 North America Cup bobsleigh series.
Last season, she did a six-week training stint at Pyeongchang’s Olympic bobsleigh course, and combined well there with brakeman Peta Tobin to win silver in the women’s Korean Cup.
If Werner can qualify for Beijing in either bobsleigh or monobob, she will earn her Olympics debut, which would be a dream come true.
After her birthday, she wrote on Instagram, “Thankful to be following my dreams with the team I have around me – here in the US, back home in Australia, and all over the world. I am so humbled and proud of the work I have done . . . one year older, mostly wiser, and a whole lot harder-working.”
Now in Europe, she told The AJN her team is putting everything into their final training block before race one begins.
“Our pre-season is super tough at the moment – hitting three tracks I’ve never seen before, and they’re all really tricky.
“Altenberg [the venue for round three of the World Cup] is one of the hardest tracks in the world, so it’s been a tough week [on it], but getting in the reps to start the season is good.
“We’ll be ready, and this is just the beginning.”
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