奇速英语

坚定的梦想无可动摇，爱尔兰雪橇手从零开始的奥运之旅

Elsa Desmond knows she is not going to win a medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics. She is not even expecting to place in the top half of the competitors. But Desmond is competing as the first women’s luge(无舵雪橇) Olympian from Ireland. And she feels like she has already won. In the sport of luge, athletes race small sleds down an ice track at very high speeds. Luge athletes are called sliders.

Desmond will not be in China for long. She competed on Monday in the opening night in the women’s luge event and she is expected to leave on Friday. She plans to return to work in Ireland on Saturday as a doctor. She has delayed parts of her job to compete in the Olympics. “As the founder of the modern Olympics said, ‘It’s not about who wins, it’s about the fight to get there,’” Desmond said.

Although she will not win in Beijing, she has already won some fights. She had been given many reasons why she could not compete: she is too short, she did not start sliding at a young age, and she could not balance a medical job with competing in a sport. The biggest difficulty simply might have been that Ireland did not have a luge organization. So, she started one herself. And now, officially, she is a luge Olympian.

She was the 26th sled to cross the line in the first run of the women’s race on Monday night. At that point, she was in 26th place—faster than none of the other athletes. That did not matter to her. She celebrated with a large smile on her face. By the end of the night, she was the last in the competition in the 34th place. “I have another job, I have to self-fund, I have all these really visible challenges,” Desmond said. “But I think everyone’s worked as hard as they can to be here.”

Desmond got the honor of representing her country in Beijing. She also was given the honor of being one of two people holding Ireland’s flag during the opening ceremony on Friday.