Skeleton hope Nick Timmings feels the need for speed ahead of Winter Olympic challenge

It takes crazy courage and an equal measure of adventurous spirit to slide head first down an ice track at 140km/h on a sled just over a foot wide with only a helmet and a slim one-piece suit for protection. Welcome to Nick Timmings’ happy place. One of two West Australians, alongside Leonora-bred bobsledder Kiara Reddingius, who will compete at the Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Timmings’ chosen discipline is skeleton. Think luge but the other way around. Instead of feet pointed at the slope below, it’s nose to the ice. “It’s intense going at that speed. Any little mistake is going to cost you big time,” said Timmings, 35, who is an events co-ordinator from Gwelup when he is not defying gravity at sub-zero temperatures on the other side of the planet. “If you hit a wall at that speed, it hurts a lot. “Once you hit about 130km/h, every bit of increase in speed after that you can really feel. The pressure on your body is huge. “Your mind has to operate so much quicker, and you have to be focused because you are moving through the corners so much faster.” Inspired by his PE teacher at Newman College, the late Winter Olympic bobsledder Duncan Pugh, Timmings grew up on a sports diet of athletics, soccer, skateboarding and snowboarding. “That was the background that helped get me into skeleton, that love of extreme sports,” he said. Skeleton wasn’t a realistic option until fellow WA athlete Lucy Shaffer was identified for her speed and competed in the discipline at the Sochi Games in 2014. Timmings attended a come and try day run by the national federation of bobsleigh and skeleton in 2012 and ticked all the boxes. “They put everyone through a 30m sprint, and there was like an overhead shotput toss, a standing long jump and some squats and power lifting in the gym?” he said. He was invited to a two-week camp at Lake Placid in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains. “It was a big decision because there are not any tracks in the Southern Hemisphere, let alone Australia. It was a long way to go, but I remember thinking even if I don’t love it, I’ll be in the US so I’ll just go on a holiday,” he said. He turned up at the camp having been sent no schedule and naturally assumed the first week would be “all theory” and the second week “all action”. “Literally the day we got there, they laid us on the sled, threw us a helmet, put us halfway down the track and kicked us off,” he said. “There is a really high drop-out rate in this sport for pretty obvious reasons. They were testing who could handle it and who couldn’t. “I remember getting to the bottom and thinking ‘That was so much fun, let’s do it again’.” The worst injury he’s had has been torn ankle ligaments. “I was at Whistler (Canada), which is the fastest track in the world, and I had a spill, came off my sled. The spikes we wear have lots of little needles that allow us to sprint on the ice before we jump on, and when I crashed, these little spikes got caught on the ice and ripped sideways, and I tore up my ankle ligaments,” he said. It will be Timmings’ second Olympics. He competed at Beijing in 2022, brushed the wall with his first run but nailed a PB on his third pass in 1min01.78sec and finished 25th. “Olympic ice is a lot quicker than the ice in other competitions because they maintain it a lot better, put a lot more effort into polishing it,,” he said. “Every Olympics, when there is a new track built, it’s mandatory for every athlete to get on it before the Olympics, but because of COVID in Beijing, I actually didn’t get that chance. I was at a massive disadvantage but my mindset was I was just happy to be there. This time it will be different.” Coached by his twin brother Dean, Timmings will be among 25 skeleton sledders who qualified for the men’s Olympic event by accumulating points through their best seven results at World Cup, North American Cup and Asian Cup qualifiers. The first event was held at the Cortina Olympic track on November 21 and the last on January 16. “The tracks are all very, very different. There are different numbers of corners, direction of corners, different G-forces, they all adhere to a set of guidelines, but they are all very different. The shortest track we go on is about 1400m and the longest is about 2.1km long. Cortina is relatively short,” he said. Cortina is 1750m long and has 16 curves, with expected speeds exceeding 140 km/h. He finished 28th in his World Cup run there. “The top four corners are very technical and you can lose your momentum very quickly,” he said of the Cortina course. Great Britain duo Matt Weston and Marcus Wyatt will be the pre-race favourites while the reigning Olympic champion, Germany’s Chris Grotheer, enters under an injury cloud. “For the four years leading up to this in my mind, it was top 15. Now I think if I can get around 18-19 I will be satisfied with that. Even though the goal is still the top 15,” he said.