Sliding into the Comfort of Home, Trinity Ellis is Keen to Inspire at World Champs
It's a responsibility that snuck up on Trinity Ellis.
Which is understandable given her rapid rise from luge novice to elite presence.
One day she's a little girl being introduced to the sport on a Grade 6 field trip to the Whistler Sliding Centre.
A blink later Ellis is making the national youth, junior and senior teams. As a teenager, she races at the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, China.
Now, just as suddenly, she is being thrust into the position of role model for lugers of all levels in this country, including members of the national team.
"That's something I've had to wrap my head around the last couple years," says Ellis, still only 22. "For a long time at the start of my career, I was always the youngest. I moved up to the senior ranks really young. I was the youngest on the whole (international) circuit for a year, I think."
Of Team Canada's 10 sliders entered in the FIL World Championships this weekend at Whistler, B.C., Ellis is the lone competitor with Olympic appearance.
But being expected to set the example is new for her.
"I'm now the most experienced competitor, so I've had to switch (to a mindset of), 'OK, it's time for me to be that leader,'" says Ellis, who grew up in nearby Pemberton, B.C. "It's definitely something that's ... I don't know if 'strange' is the right word, but it's not somewhere I thought I'd ever be. But it's pretty cool."
Apprehension aside, Ellis — who will be joined in Whistler by Embyr-Lee Susko (Whistler, B.C.); Caitlin Nash, (Whistler, B.C.); Beattie Podulsky (Calgary); Carolyn Maxwell (Calgary); Theo Downey (Calgary); Dylan Morse (Calgary); Devin Wardrope (Calgary); Cole Zajanski (Calgary); Kailey Allan (Calgary); and Bastian van Wouw (Calgary) — appears to be up for the challenge.
For character alone, she earns high marks.
"Trinity's very down to earth," says Robert Fegg, national-team coach for Luge Canada. "She's a lovely person to be around, through and through — very kind, very nice, very well-behaved, very well-raised. All those things you'd want to hear about your own child."
Given those traits, Ellis' impact, especially at the grassroots level, is real.
Speaking at schools, she aims to inspire local kids. "I've made pretty good connections with the Lil'wat First Nation in Pemberton," says Ellis, who is Métis. "It's definitely cool to talk to other Indigenous children."
After class visits, she's heard about students going on field trips and trying luge.
"That's super cool because it's definitely not a very diverse sport," says Ellis. "One of the reasons I was able to do luge was because it was pretty accessible and not super expensive compared to a lot of sports around here, like ski-racing. It probably doesn't seem like it, but, in reality, it's quite an accessible sport."
From firsthand experience, she knows that a single trip aboard a sled is all it takes to get hooked.
"I immediately loved it," says Ellis. "I was always a roller-coaster kid, so it just clicked for me. The speed and the feeling of going down the track is so unique — pretty awesome, for sure. I went home and said, 'Mom, I'm really excited,' and she signed me up. And that was that."
Soon, there were even more aspects of the sport that appealed to her. Climbing the Luge Canada ladder and posting positive results, she discovered that she loved travelling the globe. She also embraced the challenge of mastering tracks at different venues. "That pulled me in more."
As a youth slider, then as a junior, Ellis was a standout. At the age of 16, she competed in her first World Championships. In March 2020, she captured the junior and senior national titles. "If you want, you definitely have a clear pathway to the more elite side of sport."
The pinnacle, of course, is earning a spot at the Olympics, which she did.
But there's a twist to her Winter Games story. Contracting COVID only two weeks before the Canadians were scheduled to leave Europe for China, Ellis was stuck isolating in a German hotel till she could provide a negative test. Finally cleared, she travelled to Beijing, where she continued to follow protocol measures.
"It was a pretty crazy time in my life," says Ellis. "Definitely quite stressful."
Top Canadian, she placed 14th in women's singles. In the team relay, she was part of a sixth-place finish.
"At the time, I was definitely disappointed because I felt that I had more, that I could've done better," Ellis says. "But really — with the whole situation, with where I was mentally at the time, with everything else going on around me — I'm happy with how I was able to persevere."
This weekend, as Whistler welcomes the planet's finest lugers, Ellis gets to compete on a track that is only half an hour from her home. The event date, no surprise, has been circled on her calendar for years.
"A super cool opportunity," she says. "I'm getting to that point of my career where I am starting to feel really comfortable on other European tracks. But nothing will compare to how I feel here — it's just another level. It's nice to have that comfortability to combat (the pressure)."
Ellis has set no goals, beyond wanting to pull fast starts, to have runs she's proud of, to focus on the process. "Hopefully that will put me somewhere I'm happy with."
And, regardless of outcome, don't expect to see her rattled. That is simply not part of her personality makeup. According to her coach, this is one cool customer.
"Often she might have the fire, but we just don't see it," says Fegg. "Trinity is a fantastic character — very quiet, very calm. There's no big moody ups and downs. A very composed slider. She can go really, really far with that character."