General News
22 August, 2025
From Ararat to the Alps: Sarah Blizzard’s Olympic bobsleigh dream
While the Wimmera has had its fair share of athletes who have reached the pinnacle of their chosen sport, that sport has typically been more mainstream.
Think AFL, athletics, basketball, cycling, harness racing, netball, and even table tennis and rowing.
What the Wimmera hasn't had, however, is an athlete in bobsleigh, one excelling in the sport who proudly calls the region home. But Sarah Blizzard is just that.
A bobsleigh sportswoman who is reaching great heights, or should it be said, incredible speeds, on the track.
Blizzard grew up in Ararat after being born in Stawell.
Competing in athletics nationally since 2012, she more recently swapped her spikes for a sleigh in 2019 and has already competed internationally, with one Olympic event on her schedule.
Originally a brakeman, Blizzard is now the pilot of her team and has competed in World Championships.
But at the moment, her focus is on making the Olympic team in winter.
Blizzard chatted to Wimmera Mallee News from Europe, where she is carrying out bobsleigh practice and fitness training to give herself the best chance to make the Australian team early next year.
Early life
But the beginning is always a good place to start regarding anyone's life story, and that's exactly where Blizzard began.
"I had a great childhood growing up in Ararat," Blizzard shared, before adding that she moved to study at university when she was 18.
"I went to school there and was given many opportunities for a country, small country town.
"I did many different sports, and to be fair, I did hate most of them because they just weren't for me.
"A lot of them I got bored, or I wasn't immediately good at, so I struggled."
Blizzard said she did gymnastics for a long time, but she was too tall.
"I couldn't flip, I couldn't do all the things that everyone else was advancing to," Blizzard laughed.
"And then, I might have been about 12 or 13, I started athletics.
"That's when I finally found a sport that I fitted in with, and that I enjoyed.
"It took me a little bit to get into it properly, but I stuck with that for nine years in the end."
Describing "school as school", Blizzard admits that although she had her meltdowns, it did set her up well for university.
Outside of school and sport, there was plenty of family time, including camping, a snow trip each year, and visits to her grandparents.
"We'd go four-wheel driving, we'd go out to the Grampians," Blizzard reflected.
"We were always out doing stuff, and that's something I very much value because, yeah, I love doing that now still to this day.
"That's probably why I've, you know, moved across the world, because I like getting out and doing stuff."
Transition to bobsleigh
Blizzard's entry into bobsleigh was a serendipitous development later in her athletics career, as she recounts.
"I was living in Canberra at the time, so I was there for university, and I just stayed there because I liked living there," she said.
"I was there doing athletics; I was doing rehabilitation for a hamstring injury.
"I was sitting on a bike, absolutely hating it, and my coach came up to me and was like, 'Hey, would you try bobsleigh?'.
"The pilot of the women's team was looking for new members, and she contacted someone who contacted my coach, and my coach just thought I'd be the one who was silly enough to do it."
Blizzard said her coach was right, because six years later, she's still doing it.
"I think it came at a good time," Blizzard said of the proposition.
"Like with athletics, I hadn't run any faster in the last few years.
"I was still running okay, but I wasn't making any progress.
"I was at that point where I'd been thinking 'I want more from this and I'm not getting it'.
"Honestly, if it had come a year earlier, I don't know if I would have said yes to it."
Blizzard had a conversation with the pilot, Bree Walker, that night by phone, and just a couple of months later, she was overseas.
"Bree was my first and only pilot, and I was with her for four years in the end," Blizzard said.
"Generally, the team is named after the pilot, and the pilot's the one who runs the show and organises and pays for everything.
"I joined her team as one of her brakemen."
As the name suggests, a brakeman sits in the back of the sled and is responsible for using the brakes at the finish line to slow the sled at the end of the race.
Feel the rhythm
While Blizzard rates the 1993 comedy "Cool Runnings" as a great movie, she soon learned there was a lot more to the sport, which she is now endeavouring to share a bit of through her socials.
"I think a lot of people definitely get scared by the crashes," she admitted about the sport.
"The crashes can seem quite full on, and I mean, they're not pleasant, but they look worse on TV than they are.
"And I've had some not great crashes in my bobsleigh career so far."
While the crashes are a downside to the sport, Blizzard said the adrenaline and speed are addictive.
"You're pushing off the top of a hill, you get up to speeds of like, in the two women, the fastest way I've gone is (close to) 140," Blizzard said.
"I think it was technically 139.8; we never quite got there. Maybe the goal this season.
"In America, there's an even faster track, and I think the world record's like 157 km an hour in four men, over in Canada.
"So it's a very fast sport and it's dangerous, but to be fair, a lot of the actual injuries come from outside of the sport and moving the sleds and everything because they're also quite heavy."
Blizzard was an alternate in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China, and after not getting the opportunity to race, she decided to start piloting.
"If you've watched Cool Runnings, it's the one in the front of the sled," she explained.
"You're in charge of everything; you're also in charge of driving the sled down, and there's a lot that comes with that role, but I think that I thrive in that condition.
"After the games, I did a bit of piloting as well as still sliding for my then pilot as well.
"And then after that, I decided to take on a role full-time, piloting."
Blizzard's team consists of her and another athlete, who sits in the back.
They both push the bobsleigh off, get in, she drives the sleigh to the finish, and then the other member pulls the brake at the competition of the track.
The Monobob
Blizzard also competes in the single bobsleigh - The Monobob - which has increased female participation in the sport.
"To qualify for the next games, which are coming next year, you have to do both because it's a combined ranking system," Blizzard explained.
"We've now got two teams in women's attempting to qualify, which is exciting.
"It's competitive, but yeah, you've got to do both basically to be considered."
The season starts in October, and they race until the cutoff for qualifying, which is mid-January.
"You get points for racing, and then it's a ranking list, and then it's combined between the disciplines," Blizzard explained, before saying it then gets complicated.
"Then there are all these quota spots where it gets confusing, like really confusing.
"The better you do in races, obviously, the higher up in the ranking you are.
"I think January 18 is the cutoff, so that's the last race."
Within days of that, Blizzard said, athletes will get official notification as to whether they have qualified for the Olympics, which are being held in Italy from February 6 to February 22, next year.
"It's extremely quick," Blizzard said.
"You find out whether you're going or not, and if you're going, cool, great, you get everything sorted; if you're not, you don't have any plans."
If just one Australian female team qualifies, the team will consist of a pilot, a brakeman and an alternate brakeman.
"Bree, my previous pilot, she's ranked quite high, so we'd assume that she's gonna qualify, no issues," Blizzard said.
"Anything can happen, but she should qualify with no issues, where it's a harder job for us to then also qualify a second team for Australia.
"So there'll be Bree's team, which is her and her brakeman, and then my team, which is me and my brakeman, and then there'll be an alternate brakeman that works between both of our teams."
Olympic qualification
Before claiming a position within the Olympic team, Blizzard first needs to get through this season.
"Over here, in Europe, they've got some more specific facilities, which is great, and my fiancé lives here, so that's also a big positive," Blizzard said.
"But, in October, we do start training, so we're not quite racing then, but we go to some tracks that have time where we can go and use the ice, train on the ice.
"It costs an absolute fortune, per run that we do, it's like, €70.
"So let's just say $110 per run and we do three runs a day for a week."
Blizzard said it gets a bit cheaper when racing starts in November, where you pay the entry fee and the runs are included all week.
"There are two different circuits you can race on: the Europa Cup and the World Cup," Blizzard explained.
"World Cup has higher points, Europa Cup has lower points, but there's different levels of competition between both of them.
"So because of my development level of driving and everything and within our team, I'm going between both; choosing the tracks I do well at and where we think are going to be good races for us to target to try and get the most points, like a game of chess."
The first competition of the season will be held in Cortina, and then there will probably be seven further races.
Blizzard said that during that time, it gets busy.
"Coming from athletics, for example, you show up to training, you train, you go home, sometimes you're getting a massage or physio, you're doing some recovery, but that's it," she said.
"When you're travelling for competing, it's a lot more.
"But in bobsleigh, you're waking up, you have to go and prepare the sleds in the morning, you have to get them to the track yourself as well.
"When we get to the track, we go on a track walk with our coach, so that's walking down the bobsleigh track, talking through the lines, talking through the condition of the track.
"Sometimes, [we're] actually talking about nothing ... trying to get our minds off things, [because] things are very tense sometimes.
"It's a very tactical thing, so different every day, depends on the track.
"So we do that, we slide, and let's just say this was in the morning, we'll be back just after lunchtime, we have some lunch, and then we're either going and doing our other training, so in the gym or on the track, or we're preparing our sleds.
"Preparing for a race takes a lot of mechanical work on the sleds as well.
"Even on days off, we're training and we're working on the sleds."
Financial struggles
Blizzard said it's a full-time job, but here's where it gets different and a bit bewildering.
"Instead of getting paid to do it, we have to pay to do it, and it's a lot of money to do it," Blizzard said.
Last season, just eight per cent of her bobsleigh expenses were funded.
"And I was to tell you how much a season costs, you'd die," Blizzard said.
"So I'm not gonna tell you, but it's quite a lot of money, and there's just no funding that goes towards it.
"People just assume because we're competing for Australia, that it's fully covered and maybe we're getting paid on top of it, but no, we're paying everything we do, the van hire, the hotels we're staying in, the food, the fuel, the coaching, everything.
"Paid out of our own pockets, and I'm very lucky with the support I have to be able to do this as well."
Such are the costs of the sport, including equipment, that Blizzard has set up a fundraiser, aiming to buy a new set of runners.
"The equipment we're buying is a set of runners, so not just the runners that go on our feet, but they are the runners that go on the bottom of our sled," she said.
"These runners, you wouldn't realise, but it's almost, again, comparing to F1 because a lot of people can relate to that, it's very similar to the tires.
"You have different sets of tires for different conditions, different expert levels.
"It's very similar to the runners on the bottom of the sled, and basically, there are better quality runners, and they just naturally go faster on the track."
Blizzard has a set of runners, and she can use other sets, but she is attempting to purchase her own set for this season.
"To most people, that wouldn't really seem like much of a difference, but it can make such a big difference, actually, to the downtime," she said.
"And when this sport is literally in hundreds of a second between places and sometimes multiple places, there's gonna be five people sitting within a tenth.
"So if someone can donate $5, great, and if someone can donate more, even better, or if there are any businesses that would love to get a lot more involved than just donating, they can also reach out to me as well.
"But literally anything makes a difference, even if it's $2, it makes a big difference to us and the team as well, because it all adds up to quite a lot."
Reflections
A girl on a mission, Blizzard's first big quest is to qualify for the Olympics, and she said anyone who knows her knows that's her automatic goal.
"That's the very short-term goal, that's the one that's coming up this year," she said.
"But also beyond that, I just want to build in the sport, and I want to become competitive.
"I want to be chasing for the top spots in the World Cup, just as Bree's done as well.
"And I know that's not something that happens overnight, it happens with the more experience you get, bobsleigh is a very much an experienced sport where the more experience you have, the better you are.
"It's also an equipment sport; the more expensive your equipment is, the better it is and the better you are as well, again, like F1."
And although the coming months will be hectic for Blizzard, she always finds time to come home to the Wimmera.
"I'm always trying to visit," she revealed.
"It's harder because I have a busy lifestyle, and it's a little bit different now that I have a fiancé and he's from the Czech Republic.
"But yeah, I try and get that back there as much as I can."
You can support Blizzard in her bobsleigh quests by donating to her fundraiser: https://asf.org.au/projects/sarah-blizzard/bobteam-blizzards-equipment-fund-for-202526-season.
Read More: Grampians