Adventurous RAF officer flies into SA Games team

Flight lieutenant Nicole Burger’s journey to the Winter Olympics in Italy next week has unfolded at a break-neck pace, pretty much like the event she’s doing.

The skeleton slider started the sport competitively just more than two years ago, but she has since clocked a top speed of 133kph and hurtles around corners notching up G-forces of four to five, not too far off what F1 drivers experience.

The 31-year-old, who flies out of her Oxfordshire, England, base today for the Milano Cortina showpiece that kicks off with the opening ceremony on Friday, secured her spot only late in the qualification process.

“It was so unexpected that I reached this point so quickly,” said Burger, who was born in Bellville, Cape Town, and emigrated with her parents when she was around five, although she visits frequently.

“My nan’s over there and we have aunts, cousins, everyone else is still over there so we go back a lot. I definitely miss the weather.”

Possessing an adventurous spirit, Burger has done horse-riding safaris at the base of Mount Kenya after university, racked up 40 hours of flying a single prop plane and, of course, loves rollercoasters.

She also enjoyed sport, competing in athletics as a heptathlete and playing wing or outside centre for the Royal Air Force (RAF) rugby teams.

When the RAF training officer spotted an in-house advert offering some 90 sports to members, she thought her sprinting skills would be a good match for skeleton.

In December 2023, having done just five weeks of sliding, Burger entered her first international race.

The learning curve was steep, getting a crash course, so to speak, on the art of tightening the right bolts on the sled in the right way.

“I was tightening bolts left, right and centre and then my sled just wasn’t running. I was going sideways down the whole track.”

Burger, who quit horse riding because it was too expensive and gave up her bid to get a pilot’s licence because of the cost, soon discovered that skeleton was no cheap exercise.

A sled can cost as much as £10,000 (R219,000), while a new helmet comes in at around €500 (R9,500) and a racing suit about €450 (R8,540).

Hiring a decent coach costs upwards of $800 (nearly R13,000) a week.

To ease the costs of travelling around the US and Europe for the qualifying events, Burger teamed up with competitors from smaller nations, sharing accommodation and car hire.

The hard work paid off. “This season my progression development’s just been through the roof. I won South Africa’s first-ever gold sliding medal and I think out of my 12 races for Olympic qualification, I finished first to third four times and fourth to sixth another three times,” said Burger, who achieved her top speed on the famous Whistler course in Canada built for the 2010 Olympics.

Burger said the key to doing skeleton was staying relaxed. “You’re like ‘how can I possibly be relaxed when I’m lying on a tiny sled with my head an inch above the ice or when you hit the G-forces, your helmet’s actually on the ice, going at great speeds with the chance of hitting a wall or flipping out a corner?’ ...

“It goes against every nerve in your body — those first few times you go down. The thing about skeleton is you’ve got to switch mindset so quickly because you go from the push-start, which is the same as a 100m sprinter.

“In summer we train exactly the same as sprinters with sprint training, power lifting and a lot of plyometrics.

“We have that sprint start over up to 60m, depending on the track and you’re going from that pure power, aggression and explosiveness to, as soon as you’re on that sled, taking a deep breath and just letting it all go and just relaxing the body so you can concentrate, see the corners, see the lines you’re on and react accordingly.

“When you’re travelling 130kph down a track you don’t have long between corners to react or adjust, so everything’s in a split, using instinct of how you feel the sled is. It’s a lot about feeling.”

And right now she’s feeling great about going to the Games.