CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Mystique Ro still remembers her response the first time someone asked her to give the skeleton a try.
“You want me to do what?” she said.
That’s pretty much the right answer any sane, reasonable person would give because skeleton is among the most bizarre and frightening of Olympic sports, one which requires an athlete to lie face down and head-first on a small sled atop a sheet of rock-hard ice, then plummet down a twisting, banked mile-long chute at more than 80 miles an hour.
In the bobsled, athletes have the sled for protection; in skeleton, they’re essentially limited to their helmets.
What’s more, Ro is allergic to ice and hates roller coasters and skeleton is pretty much an icy roller-coaster. Still, she agreed to give it a try. One try.
“I was screaming on the way down,” she remembered. “We tried it. It’s not for me.”
But the coaching staff for the U.S. skeleton team refused to let fear and logic keep her from what they thought was her destiny. And 10 years later Ro doesn’t just love the sport, she has a chance to become just the second American woman in two decades to medal in the event at the Olympic Games when the skeleton competition begins at the Cortina Sliding Centre on Friday.
Ro will take part in both the women’s individual and, with Austin Florian, the team mixed team event, which is making its Olympic debut.
“It’s definitely like ‘let’s try to make it work’,” she said. “It is fun. When I’m racing I have a different mindset. It’s very calm. I call it my time.
“There’s no emails, there’s no phone calls, no one can bother me. It’s one minute to myself. [It’s] what I feel like I should be doing.”
Skeleton wasn’t Ro’s preferred route to the Olympics; track was. In high school she was the Virginia state champion in the 300-meter hurdles before becoming a pentathlete at Queens University in North Carolina, where she broke school records in five events. However those marks weren’t going to get her to the Olympic trials, much less on the Olympic team.
But her sprinter’s speed was an asset in the sliding sports in the Winter Games, so bobsled racer Elana Meyers Taylor sent out an email inviting Ro and other former college track athletes to a tryout camp.
“When skeleton presented itself, I was like ‘give it a shot. Let’s see,” she said. “It opened another opportunity for me to just pivot and try something else.”
At a light 5-foot-4, Ro’s size and weight weren’t right for the bobsled so she was asked to try the skeleton. There were a couple of problems though. Ro has always hated roller coasters and going down the sliding centre’s track, which has 16 bends and a 120-yard vertical drop, “is similar is roller-coasters. It’s terrifying and you’re going super, super fast,” bobsledder Jadin Hill said.
Ro, a natural storyteller who is both witty and engaging — and understatedly funny — eventually learned how to deal with those fears.
“Speed is your friend,” said Ro, whose face is perpetually creased by a smile. “I’m not a physics person, but it helps. If you don’t have enough speed, you’ll fall off. So you need to accept the speed.”
Then there was the cold. On one of her first runs, at Lake Placid, it was minus 13 with a windchill of minus 27.
“It was so cold I couldn’t bend my fingers. I’m also claustrophobic. I found that out too,” Ro said. “So I couldn’t take my helmet off, my fingers were stuck, I was hyperventilating.
“And it was like ‘what are we doing? We don’t even like the cold.’”
Did we also mention Ro is allergic to ice? That, however, has proven to be an asset.
“It’s a higher incentive to not touch the walls when I’m going 80,” she said
But all those things were easy compared to explaining the sport to her mother, who was horrified when she learned her daughter was changing sports. The second of 11 children born to Tamara and Kyu Ro, she arrived 14 minutes after twin sister Melody. Her name, she said, was inspired by the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, which her mother remembered from a trip.
And Tamara was fiercely protective of her daughter.
“She’s like ‘what are you doing?’” Ro said when she introduced her mother to the skeleton. “I’m, like, ‘I’m trying to go to the Olympics.’”
That took a while. Ro, 31, didn’t make her debut at the World Cup of the International Luge Federation, the global governing body for skeleton, until 2023. A year later she became the first American to win a skeleton race on the World Cup circuit in eight years and in 2025 she won a silver medal in the world championships, becoming the first American to reach the podium in 12 years.
She later teamed with Florian to win gold in the mixed skeleton.
If she and Florian come even close to repeating that performance in Cortina, Ro will finally achieve her dream of being on an Olympic podium. Only instead of wearing a track singlet and shorts, she’ll be dressed in a synthetic, skin-tight speed suit.
“We’re almost like ‘any means necessary,’” she said. “It was originally track and field but we pivoted on that. We’re still in the same trajectory but now with winter sport. It’s more interesting because of the diversity we can bring.
“We had this medal drought for skeleton for a while. This is the time to break it.”
The post Meet Mystique Ro, the U.S. skeleton star who hates roller coasters and is allergic to ice appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
