After a bad crash, missed competitions and delayed equipment, Suffield Olympic luge athlete Emily Sweeney perseveres

Over the last dozen years, Olympic luge athlete Emily Sweeney has been a study in perseverance.

In 2009 at the age of 16, she lost the last spot on the U.S. team to her older sister Megan and another athlete in a race-off in Norway. She didn’t make the Olympic team in 2014. She finally made the cut in 2018 only to suffer a horrific crash on her final run in South Korea where she broke two bones in her back and sprained her ankle badly.

Sweeney, who grew up in Suffield, is 28 years old and is trying to make the Olympic team once again, and this year was no easier than any other. Last month, she didn’t perform well in the first World Cup on the Olympic track in Yanquin, China. She was unable to compete in the last two World Cups on back-to-back weekends in Sochi because she is part of the National Guard’s World Class Athlete Program (WCAP) and as an active military personnel member, she was not allowed in Russia.

Sweeney made the best of it. She remained in Germany and was able to get some track time in Winterberg and Oberhof with one of the German “B” teams and finished fifth in Saturday’s World Cup in Altenberg, Germany.

She became the first U.S. woman to earn a top-five finish this year, which puts her in good shape to make the U.S. team. Sweeney is one of the four contenders for three potential spots on the team. She and two-time Olympian Summer Britcher, 27, are the veterans.

The 2022 Winter Olympics will take place in Beijing starting Feb. 4, with the women’s luge competition taking place Feb. 7.

“I’m getting back to [sliding well],” Sweeney said Tuesday from Germany. “My confidence was rocked a little bit in China, but now I’m getting back to sliding well.”

Sweeney’s mother, Sue, who has supported her two daughters and their luge dreams for years, isn’t surprised Emily came back for one more shot at the Olympics.

“She didn’t want to leave her Olympic experience with a crash — with that crash,” said Sue, who lived in Suffield for years but now lives with her husband Larry in Saranac Lake, New York. “I think there have been points in the last four years where she’s been ready to say, ‘Mmm mmm, no, that’s enough.’ But she’s stubborn and focused and determined.”

Sweeney doesn’t want the crash to define her. She came back during the 2018-19 season and became the second American woman to win a medal at the World Championships, finishing third. Earlier that season, she had won a bronze medal in her first World Cup in Whistler.

“It’s a big part of my story [the crash], so everyone’s asking about it,” Sweeney said. “I think the part that has stuck with me is there’s been a lot of injuries this season so far. Being around that many people getting injured, that has made it feel a little too close to home.

“That was a huge injury, and I don’t ever want to go back through that. Other than that, I’m not thinking of that.”

In 2018, Sweeney was in 14th place, on her last run at the Olympics. Her parents and her sister were there, watching. She lost control in Curve 9 — a difficult portion of the track which had challenged all the luge athletes — careening up and down, hitting the sides of the track with her feet before being thrown off the sled.

“That’s the worst crash I’ve seen my girls involved in — just the way she hit,” her father Larry said that day from South Korea. “Emily usually doesn’t let go of her sled.”

Sweeney was able to walk off the track. She talked to reporters after the crash, saying she was “fine,” but she wasn’t. She had broken two bones in her back, sprained her ankle and suffered a concussion. She had to rest for six months. She could only sit up for an hour a day at first. She began to walk on a treadmill that April and was cleared in August to do light workouts. She started to slide again in late September.

Her mother said Emily’s back and neck still bothers her, but Emily doesn’t talk about it much. She’s more focused on making the U.S. team and trying to get back into form after missing the two World Cups.

“[The WCAP athletes] didn’t get to go to Russia for the team trip in the fall,” she said. “It wasn’t my first time getting denied access to Russia, but when we got denied then, they said we’re still going to work on the World Cup because we know how important that is. Those were huge opportunities for us to qualify, not only personally but also [to qualify] sleds for the United States [for the Olympics]. It was a huge missed opportunity.

“As a soldier, I respect and understand the sense of accountability and responsibility that people have for me. Any time I travel, I have to get authorization to enter countries. But as an athlete and competitor, having to sit out was crushing.”

She has her sled, but she doesn’t have some of her equipment. Boxes of luge equipment and sleds from different countries were stuck in China since the World Cup. Sweeney’s boyfriend, Dominik Fischnaller of Italy, won the World Cup sprint race Dec. 5 in Sochi using a borrowed sled because his is in China. The boxes finally arrived Saturday in Germany.

“I have something that is mine to race on,” she said earlier in the week. “But I’m limited a little bit. This whole year has just been wild.”

If Sweeney makes the team, her parents will not be going to China because no foreign spectators are allowed. They will be cheering from the luge track in Lake Placid.

“She’s rolling with the punches,” her mother said. “She has a way of keeping a good perspective, like, ‘I have it tough but look at this other person who has it tougher.’ That’s her way of looking at the world.”

Lori Riley can be reached at lriley@courant.com.