Simidele Adeagbo spent a decade training in the hopes of heading to the Olympics for the triple jump, missing out on a coveted spot by just eight inches. Then she spent five months training for the Winter Games and made history.
Adeagbo is one of three women representing Nigeria in Pyeongchang, the country’s first ever team at the Winter Olympics, and part of a wider movement among black athletes seeking to increase diversity at a competition that has been predominantly white for much of its history.
“From the very beginning I’ve realised the bigger significance of this journey and what it means not only for me but for so many young people around the world and looking at this moment and really acknowledging its place in history,” she said. “I’m breaking a barrier and I’m doing it for my country, Nigeria, and for the continent of Africa.”
Born in Canada and raised in Nigeria until the age of six, Adeagbo spent her formative years in Kentucky where she set records in the triple jump. She fell short of making the US Olympic team in 2008, a moment she described as a huge disappointment.
She thought her athletic career was over and spent 10 years in retirement. Then at 36, and less than five months before the Winter Olympics, she touched a skeleton sled for the first time. By January she had qualified in a sport that involves hurling down an ice rollercoaster on a sled the size of a tea tray at over 80 mph, face first – becoming the first black woman to compete at the Olympics in skeleton.
Many sports in the Winter Olympics require expensive specialised equipment, raising the barrier to entry in particular for countries that lack cold climates. A large portion of the events originated in Scandinavia and majority-white, wealthy countries like Germany, Norway and the US dominate the medal table. There are fewer than 20 tracks for skeleton, bobsled and luge in the world, and most are concentrated in Europe.
Cost was a major obstacle for Adeagbo, and her teammates in the bobsled, amid a lack of institutional support. But she has turned that hardship into another example of what is possible for black athletes.
“We didn’t wait on government to do this. I think that’s part of our overall message: we built this from the ground up. It’s for athletes by athletes,” she said. “That message to Nigerians is important: we don’t have to wait for government, we don’t have to wait for anyone.”
Adeagbo is not the only athlete seeking to encourage future generations, and the idea of making the Winter Games more diverse has emerged as a major theme this year.
Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian, a member of the first ever women’s bobsled team from Jamaica, held back tears at a press conference when discussing the importance of representation.
“It’s important to me that little girls and little boys see someone that looks like them, talks like them, has the same culture as them, has crazy curly hair and wears it natural, has brown skin - included in different things in this world,” she said. “When you grow up and you don’t see that, you feel you can’t do it and that is not right.”
Like Adeagbo, Fenlator-Victorian was raised in the US – in New Jersey – and she previously competed with the US bobsled team, placing 11th at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. She then switched to represent her father’s native Jamaica.
In an effort in increase diversity across winter sports, beginning in 2012 the US Olympic Committee began pushing for increased gender, racial and sexual representation in coaches, officials at sports federations, and athletes.
The US has sent the most diverse team (pdf) for a Winter Olympics this year, with 10 African Americans and 11 Asian Americans out of 244 athletes. It does not release numbers for other ethnic groups and comparable data is not routinely collected. Two members of the US team are gay, another first.
“We’re excited to see some diverse faces. It’s not as diverse as we hoped it would be, but it’s a good start,” said Jason Thompson, director of diversity at the USOC. “We started out thinking, ‘how do we look like what America looks like?’ The way we thought about sports in the past limited who participates.”
But Thompson’s efforts have not been without resistance. Fox News executive editor John Moody penned a column last week that attacked the diversity of the US team, sarcastically suggesting the squad sought to change the Olympic motto from “Faster, Higher, Stronger” to “Darker, Gayer, Different”.
“No sport that we are aware of awards points – or medals – for skin color or sexual orientation,” he wrote in the article, which was eventually removed after a widespread backlash.
Similar attitudes are yet another, unseen challenge facing black athletes looking to compete at the Winter Games. Anthony Watson, Jamaica’s first skeleton athlete, knows the necessary hardships and sacrifices. He gave up a role in The Lion King on Broadway to realise his lifelong dream of becoming an Olympian. He was inspired by the 1993 film Cool Runnings, a dramatisation of the first Jamaican bobsled team, showing that prominent symbols can lead to future participation.
Watson hopes to coach a new generation of Jamaican skeleton athletes in the future, continuing a tradition he started. “Being a trailblazer, there are a lot of obstacles and opposition,” he said. “It hasn’t been easy for me, but being the first to do something, it happens that way, so when you have people coming behind you, you can show them a better way to get it.”