SALA Spotlight
alumnus Jeff Pain 
Head First to Olympic Glory
by Vanessa Clarke
Reprinted with permission from Trek, Issue #15: Summer 2006
Competing in the Skeleton is an exercise in speed, control and hanging on.
Jeff Pain, BLA’94 combines the three to excel in a very fast sport.
When he was a kid suffering from winter cabin fever, Jeff Pain used to go tobogganing down a hill around the corner from his house. “I used a metal saucer that spun around like crazy,” he recalls. He never quite lost his fascination with sliding, but these days his sled is a little more streamlined and he uses it to hurtle at speeds of up to 135 km/hr down a frozen track. Pain competes in Skeleton – a head-first, front-down version of the luge – and earlier this year he represented Canada at the Winter Olympics in Turin.
You might be forgiven for never having heard of Skeleton before the Salt Lake City Games of 2002. Women’s Skeleton had not featured as an Olympic event before then, and men’s had been excluded since the 1948 games in St. Moritz. The sport originated in Switzerland, and in fact precedes both luge and bobsled. With the arrival of formal sliding competitions there in the late 1800s, the prone, head-first position was tried and soon widely adopted for the quicker runs it afforded.
There is some disagreement about the origins of the name Skeleton, but Pain believes the theory that the Norwegian word for sled (“Skele”), was anglicized and the name Skeleton came about. Others think the name comes from the framework style of the sleds.
Jeff Pain discovered Skeleton through a bobsledder friend he met while studying for a degree in Landscape Architecture at UBC. He was training for high-jump at the time, but his friend persuaded him to try his hand at bobsledding when back in their hometown of Calgary. Pain was soon a born-again slider, but didn’t find his true calling until he decided to try Skeleton. “I wasn’t big enough, or strong enough, or fast enough for bobsled so I moved to something better for my body type,” he says. And perhaps his temperament, too. “My first Skeleton run off the top of a track was in Calgary. I remember at the beginning asking the guys who were there to push me as fast as they could, whereas most people just get nudged. I had the benefit of having been on a bobsled, but I knew only a very tiny amount about what was going to happen.” He survived this baptism by ice, and went back for more.
The speed and apparent risk involved in Skeleton lend it a certain cache (John F. Kennedy and Errol Flynn are both reputed to have braved the Cresta Run in St. Moritz ). “I risk myself a little bit every time I throw myself down a hill,” he says. But he is big on proper training, technique and safety and insists that statistically the sport is not that dangerous.
“It’s probably safer than playing hockey or soccer. Our sleds are very heavy and our centre of gravity is very low. If we do flip over it’s not for long and we just climb back on.”
He almost sounds convincing that he’s not crazy to do what he does, but then he adds: “At those speeds your body can get burned if it touches the ice. It’s amazing how quickly you can get back on the sled if you come off.”
Despite the risks, he has managed to avoid a major mishap over the years. “Every winter I have bruises on my arms but my worst injury was when I rolled my ankle and broke my foot warming up in the parking lot.”
So what does it take to master Skeleton? “The two key elements are mental and visual,” says Pain. “Mentally, you have to be able to perform under pressure – think quickly, solve problems in a microsecond. One of the advantages I have is a very good ability for 3d visualization. I can see the track, I can see what I want to do, I can see how it works and why it will work, and how I need to do it. I take that brain ability and connect it to my visual ability. I have very bad eyesight, but I think my brain processes what I see very quickly. I think I have good peripheral vision, too, which helps a lot.”
Those skills helped him to Silver in Turin (having watched the video footage, he rates both his runs at 9.5), while teammate Duff Gibson, won Gold and another Canadian, Paul Boehm, placed fourth. Despite the elation, celebrations were postponed by the exhaustion of competition, immediately followed by drug-testing and media obligations. Pain finally sat down for dinner with his wife at 1:30 in the morning. But the medal ceremony later was a chance to make up.
"The nicest part was Duff’s gesture of allowing me up on the top step, and hearing the anthem – even though it wasn’t for me,” he says. “We’re as close as two competitors can be.” Duff Gibson won’t be participating in Vancouver in 2010, announcing his retirement after winning gold. At 39, He now holds the distinction of being the oldest individual event gold medal winner in the history of Winter Olympics. Pain is intent on competing in 2010, when he too will be 39, and eager to add a gold medal to his collection. He pretends to be cavalier about his silver medal: “Ummmm…where is it right now? I think it’s on top of my trophy case.” But his wife always jokes that he carries it around in his back pocket.
Pain is married with two young children. He is a landscape designer and has run his own residential design business for the past six years. A grueling training schedule makes life hectic and he wishes there was more support. “The Canadian Olympic Committee has set a goal of 35 medals for 2010. If there’s proper athlete support and the athletes can focus on what they need to and not worry about day-to-day stresses, if some of this stress can be taken off – not only through proper facilities and equipment but also through providing for life requirements so they’re not having to pull off eight-hour work days on top of the training – I think Canada can get 50 medals,” he says.
Private sponsorship is hard to come by. “It’s hard in Canada because we don’t have a culture of amateur sports, like Europe and Australia. In North America we’ve got our professional sports and focus on those, but the US does a much better job in promoting their amateur athletes,” says Pain. “Certain sports do well, like downhill skiing, which is done by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, but the smaller and more obscure the sport the harder it is.”
Pain is entrepreneurial in spirit. He has a friend he met through the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Calgary with whom he is planning a few business ventures in event promotion. He knows what an event like the winter Olympics could do for the profile of athletes like him in Canada, and is seeking sponsors to back him in his bid for gold in Vancouver. He feels that his maturity and winning potential, together with a greater awareness of Skeleton spawned by the last two Olympics, make him an excellent candidate. Besides his Olympic Silver, he’s won both the World Championships and the Overall World Championships twice.
“2010 might be an opportunity to shift the culture a little. There’s so much opportunity for worldwide exposure – either for a start-up or an existing company with something to show off to the world,” says Pain, who has plenty of showing off still to do himself.
Vanessa Clarke is assistant editor of Trek Magazine
