Getting to Know…Sylvia Hoffman

(August 30, 2021) – For our 12th athlete profile of 2021 (and the 34th in the “Getting to Know…” series) we talk with USA Bobsled & Skeleton’s Sylvia Hoffman. Hoffman joined USABS through Team USA’s Next Olympic Hopeful series, and has been a strong presence on the team since her arrival. She is the current reigning USABS push champion, and has won five World Cup medals since her first international start in November of 2018, including gold in Königssee on the brakes of Kaillie Humphries. Prior to her time with USABS, Hoffman was on the USA Weightlifting international team, and before that was a standout forward for the LSU Shreveport Pilots basketball team.

If there’s a slider you’d like to get to know, drop a note in the contact form above or on Twitter: @thekenchilds

Slider: Sylvia Hoffman
Team: USA Bobsled & Skeleton
Home track: Lake Placid
Hometown: Arlington, TX, USA

Like we do every week: Which track on tour is your favorite, and why?
Oh, I’d have to say Königssee, strictly because…don’t judge me on this…it’s a very short start ramp and I’m super strong, super fast, and I get to do my job to the best of my ability! Most of the strength athletes are able to get out and get down really quickly, it’s short and sweet, then the rest of the track is very involved. It’s a very difficult track for the drivers. I think it presents a thing where we’re just going straight into it for the push athletes. There’s not this long ramp that you can gracefully run down as fast as possible. It’s short and sweet and straight to the point! I like the difficulty level of that track, too. The difficulty level to get it right is enormous. The drivers that get down like butter, smooth as possible, it makes them look really good. SO it’s a driver’s track, but it’s also a track for the brakemen. You find out who are these power athletes, who can get it out and get them going down the hill as fast as possible.

Do you feel like most of the tracks with a shorter start ramp play to your advantage?
Honestly I’m one of those who takes a liking and adjust to any track that I’m on. Königssee was just one of those tracks that, during my first season I looked around and I liked scenery and I liked the vibes. There were a lot of really good people there, a lot of the spectators they get to see a lot and not just a little piece of it. It just seems like it had a little bit of everything for everyone and I liked it right off the bat for that. But in general I say that I like all of the tracks. If you say you don’t like one track, then it starts becoming a thing where it gets into your head and if you have a bad performance you can say “It’s because I don’t like it and that’s why”. So I say that I love all the tracks and ramps equally.

Unrelated to the track itself, which town on tour is your favorite to visit?
Honestly, it’s a little difficult for me. There’s two that come to mind though: There’s Igls, just because you go through the town and you get to see that and there are mountain ranges around you not too far off. But then there’s also Winterberg. Winterberg doesn’t get too much sun, but my second season it was very sunny, which was very weird!

Did people explain to you that’s not at all how Winterberg usually is?!
Yeah! They were like “This is never like this!” and I was like “well it is this time!” And you could see way off in the distance. And there’s a go-kart place that we go to on a pretty regular basis at least a couple of times a quad! The coaches get in and they’re driving these little go-karts and the athletes race them. We did that my second season, and it was a lot of fun! So I’d say Winterberg and Igls.

You joined USA Bobsled & Skeleton through Team USA’s Next Olympic Hopeful. What was that experience like?
It was one of those things I had in my mind. I had a moment where it was 2018 and I was going into our nationals for USA weightlifting. And after nationals it was a depressing two weeks after that. I knew my Olympic dreams for USA Weightlifting were slim to none and I had to figure something out or I had to move on out of sport and do more of the more “normal life” stuff. It was really depressing for me.

I remember seeing the ad in 2017 but I was coming off of injury and I was there like “I’ve got this and I need to make my international team when I get back,” and I did which was great. I competed internationally and I did really well, I hit two or three PRs in competition. But 2018 was really different for me. So I saw that ad again on Instagram and thought “Next Olympic Hopeful…” and I saw “Scouting Camp” and I literally only zeroed in on that. So when I signed up for it I had no idea they were putting a documentary kind of thing to it! I did my tryouts in Aurora, Colorado and as I’m rolling out and stretching out before getting on the road to get back to Colorado Springs everyone is saying “Oh yeah, the show was really great last year,” “Such and such won,” the show this, the show that. So I start googling it on my phone and it says “Next Olympic Hopeful season two starting…” and I thought what did I sign up for?

I was like “It’s 15 minutes from my house, so hopefully I get selected!” and I did, and I just did my best. I was like “Okay, I’ve been in front of cameras before, I’ve done athletic stuff” as far as performing for coaches and whatever, so I just went out and did my best. That’s the only thing I could do, and the whole goal of me participating in that event was to switch sports. There’s multiple sports to switch to, so I was there to get scouted. Whatever coach wants to pick me up, no problem, no questions asked. But then they asked me which sport I wanted to do and I told them “I don’t know, I came here for you guys!” They told me I was really athletic and would be a good fit for most of them. They asked me which I was really gearing towards and I told them I wanted to be somewhere that would put me on track to be in the Olympics in the next Olympic season. Bobsled and skeleton picked me up, I came out for a rookie camp and was doing really well with winning push-offs and race-offs, push championships, and team selections. I’ve done really well with all of that. And now I’m going into my fourth year in bobsled and I’m trying to really dial it in. I just have to stay on my toes and stay focused on what I need to do to make and compete in these next winter games.

Prior to bobsledding you were a successful basketball player at LSU Shreveport, then turned to weightlifting. Is there anything from basketball that really crossed over to what you do in bobsledding?
I think both things really help me with bobsledding. I think people forget that I played basketball for about 15 years, and then I went into weightlifting. So I was coming from a sport that was very dynamic with change of speed, change of direction, power movements, jumping, sprinting, everything you can think of is what basketball was. We also trained in the weight room; our coach believed we should be in the weight room lifting weights and making sure we’re not getting injured. She didn’t want us tearing muscles, having any hip issues or something like that, so we were in the weight room. We did that at least twice a week if not more.

Then with weightlifting I stopped sprinting. So that movement of me sprinting all the time or running in some kind of way really got dialed down a lot. I tried to keep it going in my first two years but I realized going backwards with a snatch with a clean did not do well when I would try to shoot a basketball going forward. I had a lot of wrist issues and realized it wasn’t working, and I wanted to get really serious about weightlifting.

My first year I made the international team in weightlifting and I went to Israel. My second year I was a little more knowledgeable about the sport and the team selections because I had no idea I was going to Israel until they were like “Hey, you’re going to Israel!” Literally that’s how it went!

So my second year I knew how it was going to go, and I was trying to make that team. I was the seventh person from my gym to make that particular team. We had eight people in total from my gym at LSU Shreveport making the World University Games to go to Russia. So I thought that maybe I had something and a shot at doing something big. So I tried to think about what I learned in basketball, and then with weightlifting I learned a lot about control. And now that I’m in bobsled I can put both of those things together, and that’s the thing: Maintain your focus, don’t overtrain. And I have people who back me up, I have my weightlifting coach who was a former national team and head coach for USA Weightlifting and he’s helped me a ton in my both my weightlifting career and in bobsled. A lot of people have said “Hey, you should get another coach! He doesn’t know anything about running or bobsled!” But because Zygmunt [Smalcerz] is so technically sound and he invests in his athletes…he’s going to research to see what you need and what you can do to change whatever training regiment it is to suit your needs. So I kept him on and it’s been really great. So from there I needed to pick up a sprint coach, and that’s Nic Taylor. He’s very involved in bobsled, he’s got a track background and that’s what I needed. Nic has a lot of knowledge about the sport. He knows I don’t have the mechanics with a sprint background he knows what I need to work on. So because I have these two coaches that know the sport and know their own initial sports they did very well, it’s able to help me that much more. Then I’m in control of my push training, so I’m kind of the middle man in that regard, and I can handle that!

When you started competing for USABS you almost immediately began pushing for Elana Meyers Taylor & for Kaillie Humphries. Was there any kind of added pressure knowing that you were on her sled?
Initially I knew no brakemen, and I really didn’t know anything about bobsled coming into bobsled. I’d met Katie Uhlaender back when I weightlifted and she’d told me about skeleton. So I only knew about skeleton, I watched Katie in Sochi, and I was all about skeleton! I knew nothing about bobsled, but once I found out I was like “Okay, what do I need to do here? Nobody can control anything about what I’m doing out there but me and the pilot…okay.” So I went straight to Elana Meyers Taylor, I introduced myself like “Hi, my name is Sylvia!” and I knew Brittany [Reinbolt] so those were the only two people I knew. Because my weightlifting coach is an Olympic gold medalist for Poland in the 1972 games, he has this mindset that’s very different than many of the other coaches I’ve worked with. Having that extra level of success a particular athlete has in their career, a coach can kind of transfer that mindset to an athlete they’re working with. And Zygmunt was able to do that for me. So my whole mindset was that “Hey, we have to get in and do it. This is about performance. You’re used to winning, you’re used to doing things at high levels”. And that was my approach with Elana. With Kaillie I needed to know what it was about this woman that was now competing for the United States. Because I didn’t know Kaillie, and I didn’t know her background but as soon as I looked her up I saw she was a back to back Olympic gold medalist. I said “Okay coach, this is what we have, let’s not screw this up!” Because you don’t accidently win back-to-back Olympic gold medals. So my approach with her was the same: I noticed she was a performance athlete, and I’m a performance athlete, so that made sense for me to do what I need to do as far as performance and learn how she operates around a sled and go from there. if you want to know what to do after a car accident, then you have to ask attorneys.

So the pressure, honestly, was more learning what they do and what they need with the sleds and do that to the best of my ability. The performance piece I had down, it was the off the ice stuff I needed to work on to get it down. Because if you’re screwing up off the ice, it makes the pilots wonder “Do I really want to work with this person?” If you’re on pushing a couple hundredths more, can I count on them to do the things I need to get us medals.

What is your pre-race routine like?
It’s all about the vibes! I tend to kind of remove myself from any stressful environments and just try to have some moments for myself. It depends, every competition or race is different than the next. We’re carrying the energy lost from one race to the next week, so it just depends on what we have for the next week. I like to listen to music because I’m a very harmonious person, I used to play a few instruments back in the day, so I love to listen to music as it calms me down, it gets me up, it sooths me, it gives me everything I need to focus. Then I have to learn the track, learn the environment, know what to expect and kind of get my checks and balances in and figure out what my schedule is going to be.

It’s really about doing what I need to mentally prepare for that week. It could be just making sure I get sleep the night before or just making sure I wake up at the right time to get ready for a race that morning. It just depends, every race is different but I just like to make sure I’m in the mindset that this is a competition and we’re going against the other nations in the world and you have a responsibility to perform. That’s what I think about and then I go with it after that.

You mentioned music, what instruments have you played?
I played the violin, that was the first instrument. Then I played the clarinet, and then I taught myself piano in college! I think it was violin in elementary, clarinet through junior high, and then piano in college. I love music, and once I learned piano I tried to play Guitar Hero for fun and completely forgot how to use my fingers so I cut piano out completely! If someone asked me to play Guitar Hero I don’t want to be messing up!

So you went: Violin, clarinet, piano, Guitar Hero?
I was already playing Guitar Hero because that was a thing and I knew how to play because of the violin and clarinet was a little different. But then when I played piano it was horizontal and my brain just couldn’t do it! So I cut it out really quickly because I felt like someone would ask me to play Guitar Hero before piano, and I have standards!

If the bobsledding thing hadn’t worked out, what was your plan post-weightlifting?
I didn’t really have another sport lined up. It was the same thing with basketball though, I didn’t really have anything “lined up”. I’m a woman of faith and I also see the patterns I’ve had throughout life. And when I look back, I did have an opportunity to play with USA Basketball but my parents said they didn’t want me doing that. So now you’re playing just to play, and you’ve got school involved so you’re trying to do your best at both. And then after basketball they weren’t adding volleyball to our sports teams there. And I had weightlifting people telling me I should start with them, and I was like “okay, I should join weightlifting!” and that’s how that transition happened.

And it was the same thing with bobsled: I didn’t really know what else I could do, I’m very athletic and very talented, and I thought I could maybe try swimming because I had coached swimming for a bit and was really good at it, so I thought maybe that was something I could do. But I didn’t have a real plan, but it was one of those moments where a path was laid out for me. And that’s how I transitioned from basketball to weightlifting and then to bobsled. The path was there, and I knew tons of people who were in sports, but what would suit me the best? But here’s this number of sports, choose one, and you can be successful in any of these. But the time to take to be Olympic material in those sports, that’s on me. I didn’t know the timeframe for bobsled, and it’s different for everyone, but I’m lucky that I have that athletic background where I’m not just strong but I’m also fast and explosive, and those things help with bobsled. So I thought “maybe I’ll try bobsled, and I’ll go out there and kick some butt and see what happens!” If I take a W I take a W, if I take an L I take an L, but it went well so I told my coaches “Okay, we’re doing this!”

As a brakewoman sometimes there’s weeks you just don’t race. What is that like for someone who is a competitor?
It will drive you crazy! I think my first season we ended up having an issue in Sigulda where we didn’t make weight. So I raced my first World Cup and we broke the start record at the stop but we got to the bottom and they said our sled was too light, even though we’d weighed it like 20 times! So it was pretty devastating, and then I wasn’t able to race for the next two or three races, and I was going crazy because I’m used to competing and knowing what’s going on and everything. Once I got to the sport, they don’t really tell you what’s going on. Is it going to be two weeks? Three weeks? Never? So I can get some mental preparation for it and train for it properly. Just stuff like that and keeping the athlete in the know like “Hey, we’re going to need you at this time, be ready!” There wasn’t any of that my first season.

On my second season I knew what to do in certain situations. I’d be going up against our silver medalist from Pyeongchang Lauren [Gibbs] and we’re going neck-and-neck, and in my head I’m like “man, I’m faster than you”, and Lauren’s like “I’m faster than you!” and Kaillie said she wanted the athlete with the most experience so that left me on the outside! We both were able to race two races back-to-back here in North America. Once we got to Europe it was like “Okay, we’re going to go with Lauren”, and I was like okay that’s fine. But then it was a bit of radio silence, and I didn’t really know what the plan was. The biggest thing to me, if you’re not racing, or even if you are racing, is to know a plan. To go back-to-back and not know and you’re just kind of sitting there, I think that’s where problems start to arise. Especially for the women because only one or two people are going, where the men have more of a chance to go, so it drives us a little more crazy than the men.

For me, as long as I know what’s going on: Just like in weightlifting, when is my next attempt? Two people from now, okay, I’m ready. Just let me know and I’m usually pretty good, but if you don’t let me know I start going crazy wondering when my turn is. It’s about communication for me, as long as I know what the plan is then I can tailor my things to suit those particular weeks and I know what to do and when, and I’m able to stay ready and healthy.

What’s been your favorite sliding sport memory thus far?
In my three years of sliding I’ve been to pretty amazing places. We’ve only been to La Plagne once, it was my second season in the sport, and I didn’t race but I wanted to learn about the track and what needed to happen. Anyway, we were at dinner and we’re doing meet and greets with a company of people that were there that wanted to learn about USA bobsled. We were supposed to sit every other person with athletes and company people. Anyway, there was a person that came a bit later and didn’t get that particular memo, so I’m sitting with three people around me all of whom are from this company.

So we’re supposed to be eating dinner but we’re chit-chatting and all I did was talk the entire time. It took so long and I still had some food on my plate, but they keep offering me some new foods to try. So I’m trying new food and it was really good, then everyone seems to start to clear out. Then the only people left were me, a few IBSF people and then the company people. So I’m congregating with them and having a good time, and then someone asks how strong I actually am. I’m like “I’m pretty strong, I come from weightlifting…” and a guy challenges me to an arm wrestling competition! We kind of held in the middle for a minute and he kind of crumbled and everyone was like “OOOOOOOOOOHHH!”. And it went kind of viral through their company and he was getting crap from people the whole week! And every time I walked by somebody new they were like “AHH!” and flexing at me, it was great!

On the flip side, what’s been the hardest thing you’ve been through sliding?
Oh man! I have FIVE crashes my first season! It was rough! My second run ever I crashed here in Lake Placid, did the whole “go forwards/go backwards” thing.  And they’re like “So you still want to be a bobsledder?” and I’m like “Yeah, I’m here!

Where’d you crash on the track?
Apparently we went over in 18 in the transition between there and 19, and we went up, and then came back down.

Then I crashed twice in Altenberg, both before and after Thanksgiving, then two more in Whistler in World Championships In Whistler. One was out of four and one was out of 16. So it was a rough year for me my first season! I was like “Really?! Yeah, we’re going to do this.” I told my coach that we’d crashed, but I didn’t hurt my head or anything. I was a little nervous to get back in the sled, and my coach was like “Okay, good, go again.” So it was kind of like reps at this point: You’re okay, you’re fine, you’re alive, go get at it again!”

Question from Anna Fernstädt (CZE skeleton): What has been your most embarrassing (but funny) moment in bobsled?
I wouldn’t say it’s embarrassing…but there as a time (and goodness came out of this, we still won). It’s me and Kaillie, it’s race day in Königssee, and I’m getting a lot of coaching at his point. I’d had a lot of work with my strength and conditioning coach over the summer, I’d gotten a lot stronger and faster. I found out how to push that way, and it was a bit different than the way our coaches wanted me to push. They were like “well you should push this way” and I was like “I’ve tried that but it’s actually slower for me, it just didn’t work.” Then we’re going down through different things and what to do in certain situations. Because I’m a very technical person and sometimes I involuntarily try things at certain times and this particular time I tried something on game day.

One of my coaches was saying “you know, back when I drove if my brakeman thought he couldn’t go any further I wouldn’t mind if he jumped in a little sooner than I did. If you feel like you’re reaching that point and your driver is still going, I’d rather you’d get in the sled and not slow the sled down instead of slowing down and pulling it back.” And I was like “that makes sense!”

And I involuntarily tried this with my first heat with Kaillie. So we’re pushing and I have Brian Shimer getting me all pumped up and I’m all “YEAH I’M GOOD!” and like I said, it’s short and sweet there! I didn’t feel there like I was running too far but I felt like I was in a good spot. I was like “Let’s get these last few steps in and make them strong” and I load just before Kaillie loads! We had a pretty decent push time and and we get to the bottom and we’re in third after the first heat. We get back to the top and my coach is like “Sooooooo I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Kaillie goes “I think you loaded before me there?!” And I was like “well coach said..!” So we tried it in a competition-like setting, and sometimes I like to test stuff and we accidently tested it in competition! Second heat I loaded normally but with the same intensity, and we hade a faster start time, we won the race, so it was okay and we’re good!