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Taylorsville teen a rising star in skeleton world
By Joe Bauman
Deseret News staff writer
TAYLORSVILLE — In January 2000, teenage skeleton athlete Lyndsie Peterson showed she had what it took to be a champion someday.
Peterson was blasting down the Bobsled, Skeleton and Luge track at Bear Hollow, when she was thrown off her sled.
As she explained, the junior skeleton athletes start about halfway down the track at Utah Olympic Park. They reach the track by way of a door in the side at Turn 6. This time, someone "had left the door open" a tiny amount, she said. It was just enough to leave a small ridge on the siding.
Lyndsie had started at the top, and was flying along, critical of herself for coming out of the fifth turn later than she wanted, when she hit the ridge.
"It bumped me off my sled, and my sled went up around the turn where I was supposed to be," she said. Thoughts raced through her head about what she should do, as she hurtled down the ice.
"I just reached up, grabbed it, and got back on," she said. "It was so scary."
She had grasped the sled with one hand and somehow leveraged back on it. Of course, the incident slowed her run.
Near the finish line her mother, Diane Alserda, waited anxiously for Lyndsie to finish the race.
"We were down at the bottom and I was watching the clock," Alserda said. Her normal run time came and went, and still the seconds dragged on. And on.
At last Lyndsie flashed through the final straightaway, none the worse for wear. Everybody was congratulating her on a great save. Her protective suit had "fuzzies" on it from the friction with the ice, Lyndsie said.
One of the team's coaches congratulated her and advised her to take the rest of the day off. "Are you nuts?" she said, according to her mom. "I have two more runs" to make that day.
It was during the the incident that the coaches "knew there was more to her than pure athletic ability," Alserda said.
"There was a real Olympian there, because she kept her wits about her in a real tight situation and made a split-second decision."
Today Lyndsie, a 16-year-old with a dazzling smile, may be the youngest athlete to represent the United States on the Europa Cup circuit. She plans to compete in Igls, Austria, during December.
"That'll be great experience for her," said Robie Vaughn, program director for skeleton with the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation.
Alserda, who works as a travel coordinator for the Salt Lake Olympic Committee, expressed pride in her daughter's accomplishments during an interview at their home in Taylorsville.
Lyndsie said she first got involved in sliding during competition for a junior bobsled team. About three years ago, when she was 13, she attended a tryout in Salt Lake City during which young people pushed a bobsled on wheels.
People running the "Wheels to Winter" program thought she did not have a chance, and let many older folks try out first.
"There was this huge 19-year-old kid shoving this bobsled down the track," Lyndsie recalled. She begged to try too, and at the end of the day she was able to make a couple of runs.
"I placed second out of 400 entries," she said. The bobsled coach asked her to continue with the program.
"She was the youngest girl in the world to be driving a bobsled," said Alserda.
Later, the famous Olympics supporter Bob Bills sensed that Lyndsie could be a fine skeleton athlete and asked her to try that discipline. It is a frightening sport, in which the racer charges for 50 meters carrying the sled, then lunges down the icy track face-first, flat on her stomach.
At the start of the 2000-01 season, she gave skeleton racing a try.
"Oh, I was terrified," waiting at the top of the track.
But in true Lyndsie style, once she got going "it was amazing. It was the best ride I've ever had."
She was hooked. She is continuing, intensely learning the sport.
"It's not bravery anymore. It's perfection" that drives her, she said.
Along the way, some of the most famous skeleton athletes in the world have taken her under their wing. Jimmy Shea, who finished third in World Cup standings last year and is on the World Cup team this year, invited Lyndsie and her mom to stay with him in Lake Placid during team try-outs last month.
"We took my sled apart probably three times, that week," she said.
With his tutelage, she realized, "I was doing everything wrong. . . . I was amazed I made it through my Park City race."
Alserda noted that he helped her train. "He showed her how to polish runners, how to condition the sled."
Lyndsie is able to cover some of her schoolwork by going to Taylorsville High School, where she is a junior, and the rest by Internet courses.
Today, she is preparing for her Europa competition and looking forward to the 2006 Winter Games.
"Oh, for sure," she smiled. "2006, it's me."
Don't be surprised to see her on the podium during the Winter Games in Torino, Italy, a little more than four years from now.
As Matt Roy, executive director of the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation, told the Deseret News, "She is a great athlete and doing a great job."
E-mail: bau@desnews.com
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December 6, 2001
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