kelly curtis

Kelly Curtis is the first Black athlete to represent Team USA in the sport of skeleton. Curtis believed her days as a competitive athlete were over when she earned her degree in sport management from Springfield in 2012. She relocated to upstate New York that fall to attend St. Lawrence University and work toward a master’s degree in educational leadership. However, her track coach in Springfield had sown a seed. She made the decision to test the bobsled combo in the summer of 2013 to learn more about it. She performed so well that she received an invitation to a Lake Placid bobsled driving training programme that December.

In a family of athletes, Curtis was the youngest of four children born in New Jersey. John, her father, was an NFL player before serving as Princeton High School’s athletic director for the majority of his career. Curtis had already achieved success in basketball and track and field by the time she entered Princeton High. Her victory in the heptathlon at the 2011 Penn Relays is among her proudest achievements.

Curtis first saw a skeleton sled careening down the track at the Mt. Van Hoevenberg Olympic Sliding Center in Lake Placid. She recalls watching NBC’s coverage of the 2014 Olympic skeleton competition that winter. She was moved by the intensity of the emotion, particularly for the Team USA athletes Noelle Pikus-Pace and Matt Antoine, who took home the silver and bronze medals, and Katie Uhlaender’s agonising loss. In 2022, she represented the United States in the skeleton event at the Beijing Olympics.