U.S. Olympic luger Emily Sweeney poses at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Lake Placid on Dec. 8. (News photo — Rose Wenzler)

LAKE PLACID — Two-time Olympic luger Emily Sweeney sat down with the Lake Placid News on the morning of Friday, Dec. 8 at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center the day before she represented USA Luge in women’s singles during the first FIL Luge World Cup of the season on her home track at Mount Van Hoevenberg.

She won a bronze medal on Dec. 9 in the women’s sprint event.

Sweeney grew up around sliding and started when she was 10 years old. Born in Portland, Maine, her parents are Larry and Suzan Sweeney. When she was 7, she said she wanted to do luge and be on the Olympic team, following her older sister, Megan.

In 2018, at the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Sweeney crashed, breaking her neck, back and pinky finger. After a recovery of 11 months, she went to the World Championships and got a bronze medal. She also competed in the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, China, placing 26th.

She is now on the National Team again after recovering from shoulder surgery in June and is touring on the World Cup circuit.

Lake Placid News Intern Rose Wenzler, right, interviews U.S. Olympic luge athlete Emily Sweeney on Dec. 8 at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Lake Placid. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

In this interview, she answered a number of questions about her luge and military careers, the challenges she’s faced recovering from injuries and her thoughts on being a strong woman.

Question: Where did you grow up and graduate from high school?

Answer: This one’s not a straightforward answer for me. So I grew up with my family, we moved around a little bit, and so I was born in Maine, lived in South Carolina, went back to Maine, and then Connecticut and I graduated high school in Suffield, Connecticut. But I also attended the National Sports Academy here in town for two winter terms, when that existed in Lake Placid. So I kind of consider myself growing up in Lake Placid because this feels like home in my formative years, but also Suffield.

Q: Do you have a college degree? If so, what degree, field, college and date of graduation?

A: I do not have a college degree yet. So when I was 18, and I graduated high school, I said OK something needs to come next, but I didn’t want to draw out because we are traveling so consistently with luge. I knew an online degree would take me much longer, so I decided to join the Army instead. So I did that at 18 and I was in the Army for 10-and-a-half years.

Lake Placid News Intern Rose Wenzler, left, photographs U.S. Olympic luge athlete Emily Sweeney on Dec. 8 at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Lake Placid. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

Q: When did you move to Lake Placid full time?

A: I was here more than anywhere else from the age of 14, but I guess as soon as I was 18 that I moved here. I didn’t go home as much.

Q: Tell me about your U.S. Army service.

A: So I joined the National Guard first in 2011. Then I was a part of the National Guard for six-and-a-half years, and my job was military police and I was a sergeant. I was an E5 enlisted side, and I was there and then I transitioned over to full-time active duty for four years after that so, 10-and-a-half years total.

Q: Why did you join the Army?

A: I joined the Army because, like I said, I was 18 and I knew I wanted to continue with luge but I also wanted to have something else outside of sport. You never know when you have big injuries or when one of the variables isn’t working out for you. So I wanted to kind of diversify myself a little bit and continue to grow outside of the sport, so that’s where the Army came in.

Q: Tell me about the Army’s World Class Athlete Program. How did it benefit your luge career?

A: Yes, so the World Class Athletes Program is a program that the Army offers and it allows you to continue your path in sport at the elite level while you maintain your readiness as a soldier. There are a lot of things in order to be a valid soldier that you need to have, and so I had to work on all those things but they also allowed me to continue to compete. As long as I held up my end of the deal, they held up theirs.

Q: How has serving in the military impacted your life or made you a stronger person?

A: I’m the third child, so I’m the youngest of three, and the military was the first thing I did that I didn’t have a sibling go ahead of me. … I think really the Army taught me about myself as an individual. I had people come up to me like I was a leader, and so it works and they teach you values and it really helped find my values.

Q: How did you start luging? Did it have something to do with your older sister Megan?

A: I started sliding when I was 10 years old, and I knew I wanted to do it when I was 7. The reason I knew I wanted to do it was because my older sister Megan was competing already, and she’s six-and-a-half years older than me and I really look up to her even today. So when I was 7, I said, “I want to do that. I want to be an Olympian. I want to be on the luge team.” But you had to wait until you were 10 at that point to try out to be old enough. So when I was 10, I said to my parents I still want to do it, and we found a slider search, which is still the program we use today to recruit kids. We found the one closest to our house (Providence, Rhode Island), and I tried it out and I loved it.

Q: Tell me about your first run-down ice on a luge sled. When and where was that? How did it feel?

A: That would have been, I think, March of 2003, and I really remember my first time going down the track. Because it was a night session, when you slide at night, the track just glows cause they turn the lights on and it bounces off the ice. And it’s just this glowing tube, and it looks like a frozen water slide, but imagine it at nighttime glowing. I was so nervous and they tell you your first time that you go down that you can brake if you want so you can put your feet down and then decide when you want to lie down I was so nervous I broke through the first two curves and then laid down then after the first time going I didn’t brake anymore and I had so much fun with it.

Q: What’s your favorite part of luge?

A: My favorite part of luge is that there’s always a challenge with it. We are timed to the thousandth of a second and, so for everything to come together to the thousandth of a second, there are always things you can work on. I think that’s my favorite part. You’re never going to have the perfect run but you’re always chasing it.

Q: What is your greatest luge accomplishment?

A: This gets more and more difficult to answer. I think the obvious one is that I have a World Championship medal. I medaled and got a bronze in the World Championships, 11 months after breaking my neck and my back. So I think on paper that’s the biggest one, but I think for me personally, it’s that I’m really proud of how I have navigated this whole process it’s a challenging process and I’m proud of the person it’s made me throughout it.

Q: What’s one good encouraging luge story?

A: I think for me, when I was younger I was afraid of failing. I hated failure. I hated it so much and I did it a lot. It’s just a part of it and I think the encouraging thing is if you come back and you’re not afraid of why you failed and you lean into the criticism of it, you always have the opportunity to get better. It took me three times to make my first Olympic team, so I think that that’s pretty encouraging, even if you fail, it’s OK as long as you keep working at it, you just come back smarter and better from those failures. You can make it.

Q: What was the best piece of advice you were given for luge and who gave it to you?

A: I had one coach that had a lot of one-liners. They’re all funny. The same coach, Klim (Gatker), he told me if you do something once you’ll do it again. That applies to good things and bad things. So if you skip a part of your workout once, you’re likely to skip a part of your workout again. If you come out of a curve and you nail the line once, you’ll likely do it again So it goes both ways good and bad.

Q: What advice would you give to young lugers?

A: I would tell them two things. I would say don’t be afraid of failing, and I would say your biggest competition is going to be yourself. Really just try and make yourself the best version of yourself and don’t waste your energy looking at the people around you, and comparing yourself to them.

Q: Tell me about your crash and determination afterward.

A: Yes, so my biggest crash was in 2018 at the Olympics, and I broke my neck my back and my pinky. Your body is crazy it slows everything down, so it was kind of for me, much more of a peaceful crash than for people watching. But it was tough to find myself again after that crash because everything just stopped for me. I had made my first Olympic team, I had done the whole thing, I was in great shape, and then it hurt to move to do everything after that. Yeah, I think the determination. I lost it for a little bit there. I didn’t know it at the time. But I definitely was depressed, and I just felt pretty empty for a while there. Then one of my coaches, I needed to have a medal that season to keep my team status, and a medal when you are so broken feels so unattainable, and I went on a walk and asked him if he thought I could do it because I definitely did not think I could do it. He took a minute to think about it and he answered. He said yes and he believed in me when I couldn’t believe in myself, and that’s what allowed me to be determined to come back. So then from that moment on, I just started doing one thing a day to get better because at the time that was all I could handle and then those one things added up.

Q: Have you felt any stronger or braver after your recovery?

A: Yes, I think that the best thing that we can feel in life is feeling empowered. The worst thing you can feel in life is hopelessness at least from my experience in my life. So I felt hopeless for a little bit there, and then getting through that, I felt empowered and that is a feeling that makes me feel really proud.

Q: What life lessons did you learn from that experience?

A: I think the biggest life lesson I learned from going through that was, you never know what’s going on with people. And we talk about mental health now. It’s a topic that gets spoken about and I think a lot of the time it gets brushed over in such a positive nice way. But the reality of mental health is, a lot of it is hidden and a lot of it is not a pretty thing. So the thing I learned is that you never know what’s going on with people. So I think I give them a lot more grace in life.

Q: Was that the biggest challenge in your career, or was it something else?

A: That was the biggest challenge of my career, so far.

Q: What does it take to work your way back from an injury, such as your recent shoulder surgery?

A: I think for me now I feel very practiced at coming back from injuries, and I didn’t think I would be in a competitive spot right now and I am. So two days ago was my six months from my surgery. I think it takes trusting the process and having a great team of people around you. That team can look like a lot of different things. That can look like your family, that can look like professionals, that can look like your friends. But for those moments I talked about before, when I was really broken, and I didn’t believe in myself. I needed someone else at that moment. So you can’t do everything yourself self and it’s just about having the right people and trust in yourself and the process.

Q: How did you get to become such a strong woman?

A: I think my parents are who raised me in a way that allowed me to go out on my own, to be in uncomfortable situations but always have a safe place to come back to. I was raised, my mom worked and I had a stay-at-home dad growing up, and we were just constantly doing new things. I think it’s important to feel capable in life, and the only way to feel capable is to do things you don’t know how to do and learn them.

Q: Do you feel like a strong woman?

A: Yes, I do feel like a strong woman. And I don’t think of a strong woman in a physical way at all. I think of a strong woman as a capable person who has good values and as a good example through life. And I think I try to be that.

Q: Who were the women in your life that inspired you the most?

A: My sister was who I looked up to the most growing up and so I think she’s definitely a strong woman. Yeah, and I think she’s the one who I definitely looked up to the most. Then also my mom, it was not normal when we were living in South Carolina, for the woman of the family to work and the husband to stay home and it took a lot of strength on their part as well.

Q: How did they inspire you?

A: I think my sister inspired me. First, she showed me what was possible what could be possible in luge. I think I wanted to do what she was doing but I wanted to do it in my own way, and the way that she empowered me is, that I feel like she always sees the best in me. It’s pretty special when you feel like you can show up for someone however you are and they always be the best in you.

Q: Who, in popular culture, would you consider role models for young women and why?

A: Well Taylor Swift is having a moment right now. I would say she’s crushing it and why because I think we have watched her grow up in the media which is a really difficult thing and she seems to just be lifting women up with her and people and she always seems like she’s trying to do the right thing.