Dual Olympian Jana Pittman will face a hurdle of a whole new kind later this year, when she begins her campaign to make her third Olympic Team – only this time she has her eyes firmly set on Sochi 2014, the upcoming Winter Games in Russia.

No stranger to the spectacle and pressure of an Olympics, Pittman has been handpicked to trial as a brakewoman for the Australian women’s bobsled team under the guidance of pilot Astrid Radjenovic (nee Loch-Wilkinson).

“Astrid and I actually grew up together,” Pittman said. “We used to race 400m hurdles together as teenagers in Sydney and have been friends ever since.”

The pair started talking about sliding together early this year and for the past few months Pittman has been what she describes as “fully committed.”

“I am getting to the end of my [athletics] career and I wanted to stay involved in sport. I had tried a few other things like rowing but I really just didn’t want to give up running. Bobsled still lets me train like an athlete but it is actually much better suited to my body.

“To push the sled you need to be as big and muscly as possible. I’m six foot and was always really too big for hurdles but this is perfect. I get to run and I am not getting injured.”

Pittman, who was the youngest ever 400m hurdles World Champion when she won the title in 2003, competed for Australia at the Sydney and Athens Olympics and was unlucky to miss selection at the last two Games due to injury.

Her skill on the athletics track will now transfer onto the ice, when she hits the World Cup circuit in Altenberg, Germany on the 31st of December this year. She will have her first practice runs on ice, just two days before.

“We will have Jana with the team and slowly getting her used to pushing the bob on ice,” two-time Winter Olympian Radjenovic said. “Ironically, her first track she will face is the toughest and roughest on the circuit, in Altenberg. However Jana just told me to ‘throw her in the deep end’. That quality is essential in any bobsledder!”

“I haven’t been on the ice (track) yet but I have absolutely no fear of it,” Pittman said. “I’m a bit of a dare-devil – an adrenaline junkie – I just can’t wait to get out there and do it.”

To prepare for the World Cup, Pittman has been running track four times a week focusing on a bigger power base. Additionally she has been doing sled training three times a week under Shane McKenzie, himself a former sprinter who turned to bobsleigh and competed at the Torino 2006 Games.

“I’m loving the training,” Pittman said. “I am training more like a throwing athlete – actually something like a cross between a 100m sprinter and a shot putter.”

The news of Pittman’s move to winter sports comes in the wake of another world-class hurdler – Sally Pearson’s rival Lolo Jones – being selected onto the USA bobsled team, a team which also includes Olympic sprinting gold medallist Tianna Madison.

Although many of Australia’s Olympic sliders have come from a background in athletics, only one has competed at both a Summer and Winter Olympic Games. Paul Narracott achieved this feat in 1992 when he was part of the two-man bob at the Albertville Games, having previously competed in the 100m and 200m at Los Angeles 1984. If Pittman is successful in her bid to make the Sochi Team, she will be the first woman to achieve this remarkable feat.

To do so though, she will have to be the best person for the job – with Radjenovic trialling a few different women as her crew on the 2012/13 circuit, all of whom she has recruited herself in an all-or-nothing campaign following the last Olympics.

“After Vancouver, I had to take stock,” Radjenovic said. “I felt the team could progress to top 10 in the world, we just needed some support. I decided to put my whole life and finances into a full four year campaign to Sochi.

“I now have a solid crew of girls. It's taken a couple of years to get the standard there, but this season with some improvements from existing athletes, and the addition of Jana Pittman and Fiona Harrison, an ex British athlete, we now have a more solid team.”

As part of their current season, Radjenovic and her crew will head to Sochi in February, for their first chance to race on the Olympic track.

“All I know so far, is that it’s very long!” Radjenovic said of the venue known as “Sanki”, located at the Alpika Service Mountain Ski Resort, in the Sochi Mountain Cluster.

“It also has quite a flat push start and will not be as challenging and fast as Whistler was,” she added.

Sochi in February will be the ninth and final World Cup in the season, at which point Radjenovic will have a good idea of how she and her crew are placed with exactly a year to go until the Olympics.

“Already we are fairly well on track and comfortable for qualification to Sochi,” she said from her current base in Germany. “Although the women’s bobsleigh field is getting stronger, we are confident to qualify and are focusing more on higher results on World Cup and World Championships.”

Alice Wheeler
olympics.com.au