Sylvia Hoffman: unlikely Team USA bobsledder readies for Olympic debut

Three years ago, Sylvia Hoffman tried out for NBC’s second season of The Next Olympic Hopeful for one last shot at becoming an Olympic athlete. After tryouts, she laid on a foam roller, stretching out, when she heard two other athletes next to her talking: “The show last year was so great,” they said to each other.

Hoffman perked up. A show? She thought this was just a scouting camp. When she asked the two athletes, they told her, “Yeah, they’re going to make this into a documentary.” Still confused, Hoffman Googled what she had just signed up for. Sure enough, it’s a show with one season out already. “Wow. OK, cool,” she thought to herself. She had been so focused on the word “Olympics” that she didn’t care about anything else, much less that this was a documentary. “Well, good thing I tried my best,” she said.

Despite participating in but not winning the show, she was invited to train with the USA Bobsled team. Previously a collegiate basketball athlete and Team USA weightlifter, Hoffman had been briefly introduced to skeleton but knew nothing about bobsled. When the coaches asked Hoffman to push, she did. When she was invited to the rookie camp, she won the rookie push championships. When she was invited back to the national push championships, she won again.

A month later, she achieved the fastest push times at trials for Team USA, landing herself a spot on the team and a ticket to Canada, where she won her first international medal with three-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor as her driver. After that, Hoffman went to Latvia, which led to a tour of Europe. Since then, she has won several World Cup medals, raced with Kaillie Humphries, and last week earned her spot on the team headed for the Beijing Olympics.