American magazine, July 2016

It’s no vacation. Although Graybill’s room
and board are paid for (also, she receives a
small stipend), she has to fund the rest of
her living and travel expenses, which are
significant. In the winters, she competes in
events throughout Europe and North America.
She’s waited tables in the past, but found eighthour
shifts too physically taxing after five-hour
workouts. This summer she’s working at Dick’s
Sporting Goods and pursuing an MBA online.
Lake Placid, which hosted the Winter
Olympics in 1932 and 1980, is a quaint town in
the bucolic Adirondack mountains. Tourists
flock to it in summer, but it can feel isolated
and confining to the twentysomethings who
train there. Graybill, 28, has sacrificed much,
but regrets little.
“IT’S ALWAYS BEEN
MY DREAM TO
COMPETE IN THE
OLYMPICS, AND TO
FIND A SPORT LIKE
THIS THAT FEELS
LIKE NOTHING ELSE,
IS AWESOME.”
—SAVANNAH GRAYBILL
“The hardest part about competing and
doing this after college is that my peers are
all getting jobs and starting families, and I
live out of a suitcase six months a year, I live
in a dorm five, and one month I live at home
with my parents,” she says. “I still have bills
to pay. I can’t work year round, and finding
work that pays well is hard. But I’m sledding
for a living. It’s so worth it. It’s always been
my dream to compete in the Olympics, and
to find a sport like this that feels like nothing
else, is awesome.”
Graybill’s career trajectory was
progressing nicely until a poor run in Park
City, Utah, in January left her off the World
Cup team. It was a devastating setback, but
Graybill was determined not to allow it to
become a fatal one.
“You either let it affect you and you get
super bummed out, or you react in a way that
motivates you and makes you better. I chose
the latter,” she says. “Even though this year was
my dip year, my coaches were pleased with
my results. I won races, my world ranking is
higher, so I feel like I’m back on the path up.”
Graybill currently is ranked fourth on the
national team. With only two or three spots
available for American sliders at the Olympics,
she has some work to do before the final
selections are made in January 2018. But AU
field hockey coach Steve Jennings believes
Graybill has both the physical and mental
makeup to succeed.
“Savannah is a tremendous athlete who
before coming to AU had a very well-rounded
sports background,” he says. “I believe this
versatility allows her to have an amazing
kinesthetic awareness and facilitates rapid
skill acquisition. This is essential in all
sports but particularly in skeleton where
the slightest body error can have huge
ramifications in terms of both safety and
result. Mentally, Savannah was always tough
whether it was a brutal track workout, playing
through injury, or competing against the top
teams in the country. I think the challenge of
being a student-athlete and some of the things
she experienced with field hockey helped
her learn over time that she could do more
than she ever thought she could. Once this
becomes your default mindset, discovering
and realizing your true potential becomes a
passion-filled pursuit for greatness.”
Elite athletes harbor enormous confidence,
and Graybill is no exception. As she explains
the technical nuances of the nearly milelong
track on which she holds the record
(55.04 seconds), it’s clear that she believes
she is the best-equipped skeleton athlete
to master them.
In order to achieve maximum speed, she
straddles the line between control and chaos.
“You always want to be to the point where, if
you miss a steer, things could go really wrong,”
she says. Somewhat remarkably, she’s endured
only one serious crash. During a race in Latvia,
she flipped over and landed on her back—and
her sled landed on her. Luckily, she suffered
only a misaligned spine.
The 5-foot-6 Graybill extends her left arm
over her head and points to a spot where the
sliders whip around the track at practically
a 90-degree angle. This stretch is called
the highway, and even Graybill admits that
watching people come through here can be
“a little scary.” She smiles as she says this.
“Sometimes you black out when you slide,
because you are so focused and in the moment
you’re not thinking about anything, you’re just
letting your body do what it’s supposed to do,”
she says. “That whole [record-setting] run I
only remember two things that I could have
done a little better. Had I not had the one issue,
I would have had that 54. And I wanted it.”
Maybe in South Korea, she’ll get it.
In high school, Kerri Gallagher loved
basketball, but basketball didn’t love her.
“I wasn’t very good,” she says. “I think the
only reason I was any good at any sport was
because I was pretty quick.”
Today, she’s even faster. In the four-plus
years she’s been training with AU track coach
Matt Centrowitz, Gallagher has transformed
herself from a solid runner into a worldclass
one. In June 2015, she finished third
in the women’s 1,500 at the USATF Outdoor
Championships, solidifying her status as a
serious Olympic contender.
After a decorated career at Fordham
University, Gallagher took a job at Morgan
Stanley and settled into a standard nine-tofive
life (with a soul-sucking three hour daily
commute). But something kept gnawing at her.
22 AMERICAN MAGAZINE JULY 2016