Nick has spent $400,000 on this Olympic sport. It doesn’t exist in Australia

It’s a sticky, overcast October afternoon at ES Marks Athletics Field in Randwick, where Nick Timmings is unloading a sled and weights from his car.

Kids and locals run loops of the track as Timmings sets up on the sideline. The 34-year-old is somewhat of a regular, but no one here knows he is an Olympian – most people would never have even heard of his sport. It doesn’t exist in Australia.

Timmings competes in skeleton – a winter sport where competitors go head-first down an ice track, reaching speeds up to 140 km/h.

Not only doesn’t the sport exist in Australia, it’s absent from the southern hemisphere. The closest track to Australia, which is also used for bobsleigh and luge, is in PyeongChang, South Korea, where the 2018 Winter Olympics were held.

It means Timmings has to get creative with his training for the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics in northern Italy, strapping himself into a weighted harness three afternoons a week in an attempt to replicate the resistance of running on ice.

“[It’s] Very hard sometimes without facilities, but we just have to make do coming from Australia,” the Sydney athlete says.

“The sled-pulling I do is to mimic the start. So we have to push the sled off the ice, so there is a bit of resistance ... Doing those sled pulls as well, you kind of put yourself into a bent over position, which is what we do when we’re running with the sled as well.

“It’s just trying to mimic the angles we’re running in, and really train those muscles because when you are running bent over it puts a lot of strain on your hamstrings.”

There’s only so much he can do in Australia before heading overseas to get crucial time on the ice and to qualify for the Games. Between November and January Timmings will compete at 11 World Cup events. His best seven results will count towards Olympic qualification.

When we meet in October, only the Italian team have had the chance to try the renovated course in Cortina where the Olympics will be held. By the time the Olympics roll around in February, Timmings will have had a training session and competition on the track.

“We pretty much have to learn every single corner on the track before we get to it, just to try and make sure we don’t crash,” he says.

Every track is different. Different length, corners, direction changes and gradients.

“When you’re doing it right, when you’re having a good skeleton run, it feels like you’re flying. It feels like you’re just gliding through the air. It’s an amazing feeling,” he says. “But when it goes wrong, it’s terrifying.”

Nicholas Timmings, of Australia, slides during men’s skeleton run 1 at the 2022 Winter Olympics.Credit: AP

What is a good run?

“At the start, you run as fast as you can and then jump on,” he says. “[Then] we have to settle. We have to go from that big intensity with the running, to just be as calm as possible on the sled.”

From start to finish, it takes about 50 to 70 seconds, as athletes bend their way around the course to get to the bottom as quickly as possible.

“We use our shoulders and our knees,” he says. “So we put downward force into the sled, and that actually bends the sled, and this bending of the sled is actually what changes the direction of it.”

By the time athletes finish their run, they’re usually hitting speeds between 130 and 140km/h.

“We’re just trying to get through as clean as possible. We’re trying to hit these pressure pockets as well,” he says. “When you steer correctly in these pressure pockets, you kind of get this slingshot out of the corner, that’s how you get extra speed, and that’s how you get a better time.

“[It’s] a lot of things to think about when we’re going down, [but] one of the main things is just don’t hit a wall.”

Timmings was part of the Australian team that featured at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, where he finished 25th.

He became involved with the sport in 2012 along with his twin brother Dean after the national body went on a recruiting spree, trying to find fast runners to shape into ‘sliders’.

The brothers were flown to Lake Placid in upstate New York to test if they had the mettle to take on this, at times, lethal sport.

“Day one, we got there, we went to the track, they literally threw a helmet at us, said lay on this thing, and just pushed us down the hill,” Timmings says.

“Luckily, we didn’t go from the top the very first time, but it was a trial by fire, and I think they were just trying to see who could handle it.”

Timmings describes himself as being a “part-time slider” from 2012 to 2018. It took missing out on PyeongChang to kick-start his career.

“Pretty much went full-time [from there], every bit of money I had went into it and to try and qualify, and luckily, it did pay-off in 2022,” he says.

It’s a career Timmings estimates has cost him about $400,000. The sled alone costs about $10,000, and every new set of runners – the blades under the sled – cost roughly $1000 a set, of which athletes need multiple to cater to different tracks and conditions.

The sport really has been a labour of love and a family affair – Timmings concedes he wouldn’t be here without his partner Bonnie, his brother and his parents.

Six weeks after we talk, Timmings hit the ice in Cortina to begin his World Cup campaign, finishing 28th.

The track is technical, and punishes even the smallest mistakes, he says, but he’s confident he’ll be back there come the Olympics.

“I really enjoyed the challenge of trying to master the new track,” he says.

“Although I made some crucial mistakes on race day, which cost me time and overall placings, I’m happy about the way I’ve started off the season. My sliding has continued where I left off last season, and I’m really confident going into the next lot of races.”

The Winter Olympic Games will be broadcast on the 9Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.