This flower ceremony photo from Friday’s monobob event during the IBSF World Cup at Mount Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid shows, from left, Elana Meyers Taylor, USA, silver; Breeana Walker, Australia, gold; and Cynthia Appiah, Canada, bronze.
(Provided photo — IBSF/Ken Childs)
LAKE PLACID — The 2023/2024 IBSF women’s monobob World Cup came to an end at Mount Van Hoevenberg with a race for the sporting history books.
In the eighth race of the season, Breeana Walker — with a two-heat combined time of 1:58.67 — claimed the first bobsled World Cup victory for a female pilot from Australia, and Elana Meyers Taylor (1:58.91) became the first Pan-American Champion in the monobob.
The new track record in Lake Placid (59.22 seconds), set by Walker in the first run, is well over a second faster than the old record. In the end, the Australian celebrated her first World Cup victory 0.24 seconds ahead of Meyers Taylor and Canada’s Cynthia Appiah (0.46 seconds back) in third place.
U.S. pilot Kaysha Love set a new start record (5.76 seconds) in front of the home fans at the track. She finished fifth in the final with a total time of 1:59.32.
Rounding out the American monobob athletes, Sylvia Hoffman placed ninth (2:00.16) and Riley Tejcek was 13th (2:00.60).
Pan-American champion in the women’s monobob is Meyers Taylor, to the cheers of the U.S. fans on the track, while Appiah took silver ahead of Love with bronze. Hoffman was fourth, Canada’s Bianca Ribi was fifth and Tejcek was sixth. As at the European Championships, the monobob final of the BMW IBSF World Cup 2023/2024 also counted as a continental championship for the athletes from North, Central and South America in a race-in-race classification.
Germany’s Lisa Buckwitz, sixth in Lake Placid, celebrated her first overall victory in the overall standings for the 2023/2024 BMW IBSF World Cup with 1,644 points. With her victory in Lake Placid, Walker (1,549) moved up from fourth to second place — her silver crystal globe trophy immortalizes Australia in the overall monobob World Cup winner lists for the first time. Two points behind Walker, Germany’s Laura Nolte, who finished fourth in the final in Lake Placid, took third place in the overall World Cup standings with 1,547 points.