Nicole Silveira finds herself in skeleton and has ambitious goal for Beijing

Nicole Silveira has already practiced dance, artistic gymnastics, volleyball, soccer, bodybuilding and weight lifting. Some of those sports helped, but none specifically prepared her to ride down winding ice rinks, lying on her stomach with her head pointed forward on a sled that can reach over 140 km/h.

With a brief trajectory of less than four years in skeleton, the 27-year-old Brazilian has already earned her credentials to make history at the next Winter Olympics and has everything to be Brazil’s main name in the event.

Their classification for the Beijing Games, which will start on February 4, will be confirmed after the closing of the ranking of the international federation (IBSF), in the middle of this month. Nicole already has enough points to get one of the 25 spots and has been using the stages of the World Cup as a preparation to be the first representative of the country in this modality.

The gaucho from Rio Grande has lived in Canada since she was seven years old. The parents, who own a bakery, decided to emigrate because they were tired of the insecurity in running the business, but the family has not lost touch with their roots.

Soccer was the sport that Nicole played for the longest, about ten years, and the sport provided her with scholarships to study nursing school. In 2017, she learned from a colleague that the Brazilian Confederation of Ice Sports (CBDG) was looking for another athlete to try to classify the female bobsled duo at the Pyeongchang-2018 Games.

Nicole was reluctant, but decided to give it a try. At the time, he participated in bodybuilding events and worked at a food supplement store.

The objective of bobsled and skeleton is the same: to traverse an ice track with sharp and fast turns in the shortest time possible. The differences are in the dynamics of the modalities and in the equipment used in each one.

Bobsled is usually played in pairs or quartets, with a large sled. Inside it, the athletes are seated in a row for the descent. The skeleton is individual, and the sled resembles a roller cart with blades, on which the athlete launches himself face down.

The Brazilian’s first months of training involved only the physical part and the “push”, a starting movement in which the competitors run pushing the sled. She had to confirm her participation in the season even before the first descent for real as “breakwoman”, responsible for activating the equipment’s brake.

“I didn’t know whether to keep my eyes open or closed, you could only see white passing by. I closed my eyes during the entire descent. At the bottom you have to brake, turn the sled and pull it off the track. silly, I couldn’t [manobrar]”, he recalls, about the initial experience in Calgary, the city in Canada where he lives and which hosted the Winter Games in 1988.

Nicole took a liking to the sport, but the qualification for Pyeongchang did not come. With Beijing in her sights, she wanted to have more control of the descents and saw two ways to do so: take the position of a bobsled driver or switch to skeleton, an option that won the CBDG’s support.

The good results appeared quickly for someone who was a novice until then. Knowing the layouts of tracks around the world is fundamental in skeleton, as well as the sensitivity and dexterity to make adjustments in fractions of a second.

“We enter curves with so much pressure that many times your head is on the ice and you can’t see anything at all”, he says.

The most important thing, he assures, is not to panic when something goes wrong. “Going down a track with fear is the worst thing. I try not to think about it and now I have a lot of confidence in my instincts.

The athlete highlights the partnership with the Italian coach Joe Cecchini and the obstinacy of both as a differential. While more traditional countries in the sport work with larger teams and structures, the duo lives an almost solitary routine of improvement.

The evolution was clear in the current season. In October, Nicole finished the test event for the Beijing Games in eighth place. She was then champion of the Copa América after winning six stages and had as her best result in the World Cup a ninth place in Winterberg, Germany.

The Brazilian returned to compete in the same place on Friday (7) and was in 19th position. Your last appointment before departure to Beijing will be on the 14th, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

“When I started participating in the World Cup, I didn’t feel like I belonged at that level. Today it’s very different. There are people who ask me what material I’m using, what I’m doing in a certain curve. , says.

The same perception of surprise could be noticed in the official broadcasts of the tests. “The whole world is in the crowd, because they are fed up with always having Germany and Russia on the podium”, she jokes.

Currently, the goal of the Gaucho for Beijing-2022 is to appear in the top 10, a result that would be historic for Brazil. The country’s best performance at the Winter Games was Isabel Clark’s ninth place in snowboarding in 2006.

“It will be difficult to get, mainly because, arriving at the Olympics, the bigger teams have a support that I don’t have. They always manage to arrive with the top of the top of equipment”, he says.

Despite the difficulties, for the 2026 Games, in Milan-Cortina, the objective is even bolder: to go to the podium.

While aiming high in her career, Nicole is also thinking of ways to bring skeleton closer to other Brazilians living in Canada, especially teenagers. Last summer, she took her gear to a country community event in Calgary and enlisted interested parties who would later show up at the practice track to get a closer look at the sport.

Throughout the year, Nicole divides her attention between skeleton (mainly in winter) and work as a nurse (in summer), including working directly in hospitals during critical periods of the Covid-19 pandemic.

​A double life that she does not intend to change entirely, although she envisions a sponsorship that would help her to dedicate herself even more to the sporting activity.

“I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a nurse. The idea of ​​living alone as an athlete is really cool, but working at least one or two days a week [com enfermagem] It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. The ideal would be to work less and not have a job out of necessity, but because you want to,” he concludes.