It is a wild idea to throw yourself down a frozen track headfirst on a tiny sled, picking up speeds that would earn a ticket if you were driving, whipping around icy bends in a blur.
It is an even wilder idea to do so in competition with your spouse.
Kim Meylemans, 29, of Belgium, and Nicole Silveira, 31, of Brazil, are both competing at the Winter Olympics in Italy in the sliding sport known as skeleton. The final races and medal ceremony are set for Saturday.
Yes, Valentine’s Day.
The couple’s heated rivalry includes a lot of love. Though each competes for her own country, they have also created their own unit: Team BB.
They share a chef, a sprinting coach, a physiotherapist and exercise equipment. They train together, travel together and watch videos of each other racing, offering tips. They are bunking together at the Olympic athletes’ village in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in northern Italy.
They’ve even made little Team BB pins, their contribution to the currency of the Games for athletes and others who love trading the trinkets like friendship bracelets at a Taylor Swift concert.
Sam Verslegers, the couple’s physiotherapist, said it wasn’t unusual for competing countries to pool resources to save money. But he was unaware of two athletes from different nations in effect forming their own team.
“And two wives? That’s unheard-of,” he said. “When the helmet is on, they focus on their own performance, but once the helmet is off, they’re wives again.”
During practice at the Cortina Sliding Center, where the competition is held, the couple is all business. Chitchat is off the table. During an outdoor photo shoot last week, an older Italian woman shoveling snow nearby looked at Ms. Meylemans’s stoic expression and shouted, “It’s nice to be at the Olympics! Smile!”
But in a video interview before the Games began, they laughed as they discussed their unusual sport — and unusual relationship.
They met in 2019 on the skeleton World Cup circuit, a series of competitions held in the winter, mostly in Europe. During the Covid-19 pandemic, hotel rooms were in short supply, so they shared accommodations. Love soon followed.
They were engaged in 2024 during a trip to Brazil, and even that was a competition. Ms. Silveira popped the question and Ms. Meylemans said, “No!” — because she was carrying a ring in her pocket and had planned to do the proposing.
They were married last year, in Calgary, Alberta, where they wore matching white pantsuits and pride flags served as table décor.
The couple are ambassadors for Pride House in Milan, an Olympic venue meant to serve as a safe, inclusive place for L.G.B.T.Q. athletes and fans as Italy’s government rolls back rights for gay people under the country’s far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
Having a baby through surrogacy was already illegal in Italy in 2024 when the country criminalized seeking surrogacy abroad. L.G.B.T.Q. couples are not allowed to marry, adopt or use in vitro fertilization in Italy. Ms. Meloni once said, “Yes to the natural family. No to the L.G.B.T. lobby.”
Ms. Meylemans called the moves “very, very sad,” particularly in the heart of Europe, and said it has encouraged her and Ms. Silveira to speak out even more on behalf of gay couples.
“It’s a statement,” she said. “We’re not just friends. We’re not just girlfriends. We’re wives. And there’s no way around that.”
Lizzy Yarnold, a two-time skeleton gold medalist for Britain who now commentates on the sport for the BBC, said that as far as she knows, no couple has competed against each other in the sport before.
“Seeing that display of love and joy is just so important,” she said. “That’s what sports is really all about.”
Ms. Meylemans and Ms. Silveira came to skeleton very differently.
Ms. Meylemans was born in Germany to Belgian parents. She struggled with asthma as a child, and attended a boarding school in the mountains of southern Germany that specialized in treating children with the affliction. She loved sports, particularly soccer, but playing in the mountains meant chasing balls rolling downhill more often than kicking them, she said with a laugh.
There was a sliding track nearby and she had always thought skeleton looked “kind of bad-ass.” At age 13, she gave it a try.
“I wouldn’t say that I loved it from the first run,” she said. “It’s one of those things that kind of grows on you.”
Around the same time, halfway around the world, Ms. Silveira’s family moved from Brazil to Canada. At 23, she was living in Calgary and training to be a nurse while bodybuilding in her free time. A team of Brazilian bobsledders living in Canada recruited her as a brakewoman — the person who pushes the sled at the start of the race and brakes at the end, but otherwise is along for the ride.
“I’m a bit of a control freak so I did not enjoy jumping in a sled, just sitting there and praying we wouldn’t crash,” she said.
Instead, she tried skeleton, which uses the same track. She found it terrifying at first, but she at least controlled her own fate. She, too, grew to love it.
Ms. Meylemans and Ms. Silveira said that competing against each other hasn’t been a problem because skeleton is an individual sport. They are not hockey players facing off on the ice or boxers trading punches in a ring.
“We’re on the same team,” Ms. Silveira said. “A win for either one of us is a win for the team.”
The real battle in skeleton is against the ice track. Athletes start with a roughly 30-meter sprint on a flat stretch of ice, holding onto the sled with one hand. Then they leap onboard headfirst, stomach down, clutching the sled’s handles.
From there, it’s like riding on an ice roller coaster, with swooping curves that sometimes push the racer’s body up the sides of the track at speeds exceeding 80 miles per hour. (Ms. Silveira said her top speed was about 90 m.p.h.) There are no brakes, and the racer can’t see much, their eyes just inches off the ground behind a thick helmet.
Mercifully for the athlete, the average race is over in just under a minute.
“You have to learn the physics of it,” Ms. Meylemans said. “A lot of it is blind and very much based on feeling.”
Both of them have suffered concussions, and they said whiplash, broken ankles, sprained shoulders and bruising are common.
Ms. Meylemans made her Olympic debut in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and both women competed in the 2022 Beijing Games. Both are in good form coming into these Games: Ms. Meylemans won the World Cup in January, and Ms. Silveira placed ninth.
If this is their final Olympics, as both expect, they are going out in style. Ms. Silveira carried the flag for Brazil in the opening ceremony in Cortina, wearing an avant-garde puffy white cape. The couple is getting ready to settle down in the house they own in Calgary and start a family. Dogs, for sure. Children, maybe.
Asked whether they would want their children to take up skeleton, they responded in unison.
“Hell no!”
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
The post Heated Rivalry and Marital Bliss: Two Wives Go Head to Head in a Scary Olympic Sport appeared first on New York Times.
