From growing up in the West Australian Goldfields where summer temperatures hover around 38
degrees, to this.
Kiara Reddingius represents Australia in bobsled and she’s in the running to qualify for
the Winter Olympics.
We’re proud of you darling.
Thanks mum.
I learnt from so many people and took on board so much advice to be able to change what I
was doing very quickly, to be able to perform in the way I did and so I’m really proud
of that.
Kiara Reddingius grew up near the mining town of Leonora, nine hours from Perth.
Her parents Rene and Rosemary are techers in Leonora1 and run a hobby farm.
It's where their children spent most of their time outdoors.
We have the menagerie as everyone calls it, we have goats and camels and horses and dogs
and cats and pigeons and kangaroos and all sorts of things.
She had plenty of opportunity to explore her own limits, physical limits and knew what
she was capable of.
She did very well as a school athlete in the Northeastern Goldfields.
Kiara had little formal athletics training before she was 20 years old and met coach
Darren Clark when she moved to Melbourne to be closer to the athletic circuit.
Twenty years of age is quite late for an athlete to start.
Usually we'd find kids coming up through little athletics and starting at six and seven.
The first thing that stands outabout Kiara is she is incredibly fit and strong and she’s
really determined and focused.
So she’d set her mind on something that that was a single goal and she worked really
hard to try and achieve her goals.
Within five years, she was competing with the country's best as a heptathlete.
But in 2018, narrowly missed out on selection to the Commonwealth Games and suffered from
some injuries after that.
And then I got approached by a guy called Shane and he came up to me and he said, “Have
you ever thought about bobsled?”
And I was like, I don't – like Cool Runnings?
what?
And he goes, “No, I'm serious.
Australia has a bobsled team and I think you would be really good at it.
You're a really strong runner and you look like you have the ability to be really good
bobsledder.”
Kiara rang me up and said, a person called Ashleigh rang me up and wants me to join in
bobsledding, give it a go.
I said “what's that?”
And she said, “oh pushing the sled and got to go over to Europe, etc.
And I said well go for it.
We call it the Cool Runnings kid.
I think if she makes the Olympics Leonora will get a big screen and we’ll be watching
the desert kid doing the doing the run.
I've never been one with a massive Olympic dream.
I probably I didn't think that I was ever that sort of quality athlete, when I was younger,
we grew up, obviously, in Leonora in a very small town and we didn’t really have the
scope or the influence to say that you're going to be an Olympic athlete.
I work hard to make sure that my mind and my body and my recovery and my connections
with other people are the best that I can make at that time and I think that’s what’s
gotten me to the place that it has because I really believe that’s how anyone can achieve
big things, by just being putting in the work to be the best they can be in the moment.