UK Track-and-Field Star Competes in ’18 Winter Olympics
September 12, 2017. That was the first time 2003 UK graduate Simidele Adeagbo ever touched a skeleton sled.
She’d never even heard of the sport until December 2016. Now she’s just represented Nigeria in the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics as the first African-American woman to compete in skeleton.
Adeagbo was born in Toronto to Nigerian parents but spent the first six years of her life in Nigeria. She and her family moved to the United States and settled in Kentucky, where she attended Eastern High School in Louisville. Jim Holman, her track coach, said that “she was never satisfied with being average. Simi just felt like no one should beat her, no one should outwork her.”
Holman was right. Adeagbo still holds the long jump record for her high school — a feat she accomplished in 1999. She went on to the SEC’s University of Kentucky, where she was a four-time NCAA All-American. And though she graduated in 2003, she still holds UK’s records for indoor and outdoor triple jump. In January 2017, she was inducted into the Kentucky Track and Cross Country Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Okay, we’ve established Adeagbo’s great athletic prowess. But how does a track-and-field star wind up flying down an icy chute, headfirst, facedown at about 80 mph in the Winter Olympics? First off, she’s no stranger to the Olympic trials. After participating in the 2004 and 2008 Olympic trials for triple jump and just missing the cut for the 2008 Olympics, she hung up her spikes and put her Olympic medal dreams behind her. Or so she thought. Nine years later, Adeagbo read an article about women in Africa putting together a first-ever Olympic bobsled team. Knowing that it’s common for track-and-field stars to make the jump to bobsled, she reached out, but the team was already complete. A short while later, she learned (on Instagram, of all places) that the Nigerian Bobsled and Skeleton Federation was holding tryouts. She flew from her hometown of Johannesburg to Houston for the tryouts, and, at 36 years old, she made her first Olympic appearance just three months after her first skeleton race.
Impressive, to say the least. But Adeagbo’s incredible climb to the Olympic stage wasn’t driven by the medal aspirations she had when she was younger. Now it’s about something much bigger than medaling. She said: “When I retired from track and field, I didn’t expect that I would have a second chance at the Olympics — and I would have never thought that I’d be a Winter Olympian. But when I saw the article about the bobsled ladies, it wasn’t so much my personal Olympic dreams that grabbed me; it was more of the meaningful nature of what they were trying to accomplish that really inspired me.” She went on to say that “Ultimately for me, this is about breaking barriers in winter sports. It’s about making history. And leaving a legacy. It’s about moving the sport forward. That’s so much bigger than just me being an Olympian.”
In the SEC, It Just Means More.
To Adeagbo, It Just Means More Momentum for an Entire Nation.
