Dhe stepdad thought it was cool. Immediately. “He was immediately enthusiastic, he knew everyone from television, André Lange, Kevin Kuske,” remembers Kim Kalicki. Seven years ago, the woman from Wiesbaden went to Winterberg for the first time to try out a bobsled. An athletics trainer from the field of athletics arranged the taster day.
Seven years later, Kim Kalicki, now 24 years old, is sitting in Yanqing, eighty kilometers north of Beijing, contemplating how things could turn out on the Olympic track. “I’m relatively relaxed,” she says: “We don’t want to drive ourselves crazy.” She still has a few days left, the official training runs don’t start until Tuesday, the two-man bobsleigh competition isn’t until next Friday and Saturday (both at 1 p.m and 2.30 p.m. CET in the FAZ live ticker for the Olympics and at Eurosport).
Before traveling to the Olympics in the Far East on the most modern track in the world, Kim Kalicki became European Champion on the natural ice of the oldest and most traditional bobsled track in the world, the Olympia Bob Run St. Moritz-Celerina. It was also her second World Cup victory. As things stand, in the seven years the teenager who, unlike her stepfather, had “absolutely not” been involved with bobsleigh before the appointment in Winterberg, has become a top pilot.
Her original plan was to try it as a brake. Today’s national coach René Spies had other ideas: “René said: push it, try it.” And soon Kalicki was sitting in the bobsleigh, starting from turn nine, “you chug along and see: how does the bobsled?” the Winterberger Bahn developed and over the course of the winter also the other railways in Germany.
In the second winter then abroad: Innsbruck-Igls, for example. A track that Kalicki says is zero eighteen: “Anyone can go down there.” The National Sliding Center in Yanqing is quite different. “Cannot be compared to any other track,” says Kalicki, “demanding, with three or four tricky sections. I like this.”
A new pusher
The fact is that the pilots of the bobsleigh and sled association for Germany have recently set the standard for men and, to a lesser extent, for women. Kim Kalicki finished in the top three in six out of eight World Cup races and won two. Despite this, Kalicki does not formulate any ambitions for the Olympic race, apart from the claim to “come down properly four times” on the 1615 meter long track.
Kalicki has only contested two races with her new brakewoman, Lisa Buckwitz. Buckwitz, 27, surprisingly raced to Olympic victory four years ago in the back of Mariama Jamanka in Pyeongchang. Now Kalicki and Buckwitz are working on perfecting the interaction at the start. “You can work on the rhythm. When Lisa says ‘And’, we both have to put our strength into the bobsled,” says Kalicki. “You can practice that by clapping, it works.” You could put it this way: They won the races in Altenberg in December and St. Moritz in January.
“I’m very picky”
The bobsleigh competitions of the Olympic Games differ from the eight World Cup races in that, like the World Championships, they are held in four heats. Kalicki, 2020 Hessen’s Sportswoman of the Year, only knows this experience from the 2020 and 2021 World Championships, each in Altenberg. She finished second in both years. In Yanqing, however, only those who steer cleanly through the ice channel in all runs will end up at the top. Kalicki tries to memorize, “visualize” the route in the coming days.
Eileen Gu, the freeskier who won the Big Air competition on Tuesday in Beijing, later claimed that she had never tried the winning trick, a four-and-a-half spin, in training before, but only practiced it in her mind, night after night , an hour and a half before sleep.
Kalicki says that the time on the bus and before the start is enough for her to memorize the track. Really “very, very good rides”, so good that their own requirements are met, have so far only been achieved in Winterberg. “I’m very picky,” says Kim Kalicki of herself. But in China it should be four decent runs.
