It’s a sliding feeling all over again for bobsleigh star Breeana Walker

Breeana Walker, Australia’s in form bobsleigh athlete, is in the mix for a medal in Beijing. But will she get there?

Bobsleigh pilot Breeana Walker is a medal chance in Beijing, if she gets there

Breeana Walker, Australia’s in form bobsleigh athlete, is in the mix for a medal in Beijing, with her mono bob World Cup podium spots in Winterburg and Sigulda this month being a first for an Australian sliding competitor. But will she get there?

Ranked No.5 in the world behind two Americans and two Germans, Walker may have thought the selection nightmare that cost her a spot in the PyeongChang Olympics four years ago was well behind her.

But once again, Walker, 29, is having a nervous wait to have her selection for the Beijing Olympics confirmed.

Fellow Australian bobsledder and the world’s fittest woman, Tia-Clair Toomey, claimed on Instagram earlier this week to have made the Olympics with her pilot Ashleigh Werner, even though there is only one current two-man bob team allocated to Australia.

The athlete competing in the mono bob must come from one of the two members of the two-man team.

A reading of the rules shows that Sliding Sports Australia bases its selection on ranking lists on combined results across the mono bob and two-man bob events, of which Walker is way ahead. But Toomey’s efforts as the brakeman with Werner have helped Australia secure the Olympic two-man bob spot and they accumulated 730 points over the seven races compared to Walker’s two-man team tally of 712 points.

Walker, who hails from the Yarra Valley in Victoria but who has been based in Germany for the past two years, had expected a selection drama, but not the one that has eventuated.

Instead she thought the pressure would be one of her own making: having to decide which of the women who have been working as her brakeman would be selected for the Olympics.

Kiara Reddingius, who spent some time also working with Werner, switched across to Walker before Christmas when Walker’s usual brakeman Sarah Blizzard became unwell.

“Kiara has gone gangbusters, she is such a talented athlete and she was able to slide with me before the Christmas break,’’ Walker said from her training base in Germany ahead of her final competition in Innsbruck on Saturday.

“My two-man wasn’t doing so good, we needed to give it a go and see what happens. We competed together and we achieved my career result of seventh place and I pushed my fastest times on that track. Usually I would have gone back to Sarah Blizzard, but she had a Covid infection and Kiara stepped up again and raced with me in the last two races, but I’ll be racing with Sarah again this week. After this weekend we will decide who I will slide with for the Olympics. It is just going to depend on Sarah’s pushing this weekend, and where we place at the end of the day.”

It is a decision Walker is not relishing but acknowledges: “At the end of the day you have to take the personal side of it out and just treat it like businesses. They understand that performance is all that matters and it’s hard. Sarah has been with me for the majority of the Olympic cycle and we have to see.

“Even though that one person won’t be sliding, they are still part of this team and why we are achieving the results that we are.”

Four years ago, Walker had met all of the qualifying standards for the Games in South Korea, and the Australian Olympic Committee had her team pencilled in, but inexplicably the national federation didn’t select her. At the time, Walker’s brakemen were Werner and Mikayla Dunn.

The then Sliding Sports Australia director Ted Polglaze said: “We need to go beyond people just reaching the minimum standard to get an invite.’’

At the time there was a suggestion that Walker, who had switched from athletics, where she was a national level 400m runner under Cathy Freeman’s coach Peter Fortune, was not experienced enough. But Walker discounted that as being completely unfounded as she had proven herself to get to the point of earning an Olympic slot from the International federation.

Walker says she was “absolutely blindsided’’, adding: “I don’t know if we will get down to the crux of the real reason why they didn’t select us.’’

Such was the tumultuous fallout, there was a change in the sport’s hierarchy and Walker, fuelled with a sense of injustice, rose through the bobsleigh ranks, particularly in the new mono bob event, which uses identical $75,000 sleds for all of the competitors.

In the end, Walker did go to PyeongChang, but as a spectator, and she said that brutal time four years ago “was the starting point of everything really’’.

“I got to see what people looked like from the outside and then also got a taste of what it would be like at the Olympics, and I have been able to use that in my visualisations throughout this whole Olympic cycle.”

Olympic champion freestyle skier Lydia Lassila has become a mentor for Walker. She said the one thing that has stuck in her head was Lassila’s advice to “stay present”.

It’s good advice for Walker, who may have to wait a few more days to see if Toomey and Werner will contest the selection decision at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Instead of fretting about selection policies, Walker wants to concentrate on a final bloc of dry land training in Germany before heading to Beijing.