Athlete Bios
Skeleton
Pain looks to capture gold at 40
Last Updated: Saturday, February 6, 2010 | 8:20 PM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
Veteran skeleton racer Jeff Pain says the only thing missing in his career is an Olympic gold medal. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images) The first thing that jumps out about Jeff Pain is that he slides with an angry-looking beaver graphic painted on his helmet.
The beaver is Canada’s national animal, and Pain came up with the idea after the United States’ Jim Shea slid with an eagle painted on his helmet at the 2002 Salt Lake Games.
The second is that Pain is one of the older Olympic competitors. By the time the Games start, he will be 40 and still looking to capture his first Olympic gold medal in what will probably be his last competition. Pain won silver in skeleton at the 2006 Turin Games. He finished behind the Canadian Duff Gibson, who has since retired.
“An Olympic gold medal is the only thing missing for me,” Pain recently told The Ottawa Citizen.
Pain, a veteran of the national team since 1995, won gold medals at the world championships in 2003 and 2005. He ended sixth at his first Olympics, in 2002, and missed a stretch of the 2003-04 season with a broken foot.
He began sliding in skeleton before it was reinstated as an Olympic sport before the 2002 games. For a while, he raced in bobsled before giving it up to focus on skeleton.
Pain, who was born in Anchorage but moved with his family to Calgary when he was a year old, graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in landscape architecture.
