T&T’s pres­ence at the Win­ter Olympic Games was felt for a sec­ond time in Alpine Ski­ing on Sun­day (Feb­ru­ary 15) when Em­ma Gat­cliffe made her de­but. In do­ing so, she be­came the first fe­male ath­lete to rep­re­sent T&T in the event.

Fol­low­ing Nikhil Al­leyne on Sat­ur­day, Gat­cliffe rep­re­sent­ed T&T in the Women’s Gi­ant Slalom at the Mi­lano Corti­na and re­turned a 45th po­si­tion over­all with a com­bined time of 2:28.19 af­ter com­plet­ing both runs. She was the lone ath­lete from the Caribbean to com­pete in the event.

Af­ter­wards, Gat­cliffe ex­pressed sat­is­fac­tion with her per­for­mance de­spite a ner­vous start.

​“Over­all, I'm pret­ty hap­py with my re­sult. I think I made some good turns and had some good sec­tions of the course. It was def­i­nite­ly pret­ty tough be­cause the trail had a lot of rollers, so it was kind of tough mak­ing sure that you came over those rollers in the right di­rec­tion and what­not. So over­all, I'm pret­ty hap­py about it, con­sid­er­ing GS isn't nec­es­sar­i­ly what I'm most con­fi­dent in. I would say I'm more con­fi­dent in my slalom at the mo­ment, but I'm pret­ty hap­py with how it went to­day,” Gat­cliffe ex­plained.”

The Cana­di­an-born ath­lete has vis­it­ed T&T sev­er­al times, though her vis­its have be­come less fre­quent since she be­gan her in­ten­sive ski­ing ca­reer. The 21-year-old at­tends St Lawrence Uni­ver­si­ty and is a mem­ber of the St Lawrence Saints alpine ski team as well as the Kap­pa Gam­ma soror­i­ty.

Yes­ter­day, she ex­pe­ri­enced her tough­est chal­lenge in the sport, mak­ing her de­but at the Win­ter Olympics.

“The fo­cus wasn't nec­es­sar­i­ly re­sult-based. It was more just ski­ing, how I had been ski­ing, train­ing and fo­cus­ing on my strengths at the time. Kind of just fo­cus­ing on that, so not re­al­ly my goals weren't nec­es­sar­i­ly re­sult-based, but yeah, kind of just fo­cus­ing on that and hav­ing a good time and just try­ing to have fun and not let my nerves take con­trol, just to try and stay re­laxed. That was my ap­proach of the day.

“I be­lieve I fin­ished 45th, and I was 14 sec­onds out of first place. So over­all, I mean, I start­ed in my bib was num­ber 62, so I moved a few spots, which I'm hap­py about, but over­all, yeah, those were my re­sults and how far out I was from the win­ner."

Like Al­leyne, Gat­cliffe will head back to her school.

She said, “I'm gonna go back and fin­ish my Car­ni­val sea­son with my school once I get back to New York. Just to fin­ish rac­ing with my school and con­tin­ue rac­ing on the East Coast and up in Que­bec at the end of the year, and then we'll see where I go from there, but I don't re­al­ly have too many plans go­ing for­ward, just kind of rac­ing and fin­ish­ing the sea­son off strong.”

To­day, the T&T two-man bob­sled team will be­gin their quest for glo­ry at 10 am. The team fea­tures cap­tain Ax­el Browne and De Aun­dre John.

Speak­ing ahead of the event, Browne said, “Dre and I are both ex­cit­ed and ready to go. This is a big mo­ment for both of us, our first time com­pet­ing in front of any­thing like the crowd that we're go­ing to be in front of, and we're just go­ing to try and em­brace it and use that en­er­gy and ex­cite­ment to put in our best per­for­mance pos­si­ble.

“We know we're on the back foot, we've on­ly had 10 train­ing runs, most of the field came here for World Cup ear­li­er in the year but we had to pri­ori­tise qual­i­fy­ing for the race be­fore we pri­ori­tised do­ing well at the race, so we didn't get to do that World Cup, but we're here and we're ready to rep­re­sent T&T with pride and hon­est­ly just re­al­ly ex­cit­ed.”