The first time I saw snow, tropical-nation winter-sport athletes relive that magical moment. Winter Olympic 2026, For athletes who grow up far from winter, seeing snow for the first time can feel like stepping into another world. Olympics.com has been revisiting those memories with winter-sport athletes from tropical and desert nations, from an Australian bobsledder raised in the outback to a Ghanaian skeleton slider discovering ice for the first time.
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Writer J.B. Priestley once described snowfall as a kind of enchantment, a transformation that turns the familiar into something new overnight. That sense of wonder was very real for Australian bobsleigh athlete Kiara Reddingius, who spent her childhood in a remote mining town surrounded by red dust rather than white powder.
Reddingius still remembers the moment vividly. Her first-ever World Cup event was also the first time she had seen snow. Speaking to Olympics.com ahead of a crucial Winter Olympic 2026 qualifying season, the Beijing 2022 Olympian recalled waking early during the Innsbruck World Cup in Austria in November 2021 to a sight she had never experienced before.
At the time, she was racing on Ash Werner’s team. Werner went to the bathroom in the early hours, noticed Reddingius was already awake, and told her to look outside. Curious, Reddingius peered through the window and immediately wanted to go out. The team headed downstairs around six in the morning and threw snowballs, laughing and marvelling at the unfamiliar cold.
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Olympic Games: A World Away Growing Up in Remote Leonora
These days, the novelty has worn off. Reddingius knows that fresh snowfall is not what elite bobsleigh Olympic Games athletes hope for on race day. At the highest level, the sport depends on hard, fast ice, allowing sleds to reach speeds of up to 145 kilometres per hour. Snowy conditions can level the playing field in the wrong way, turning competitors into reluctant snowploughs.
Besides making it harder to judge who is truly driving and pushing best. Still, the contrast between where she started and where she is now remains striking. Reddingius was born and raised in Leonora, a tiny gold-mining town in the Australian outback. Once home to thousands during the gold rush, Leonora now has a population of around 600.
The nearest regional centre, Kalgoorlie, lies more than 200 kilometres away, while Perth, the state capital, is over 800 kilometres distant. In short, Leonora is remote. Very remote. Reddingius describes her childhood as free and outdoorsy. She grew up on a small hobby farm with her parents, both teachers, and her siblings. Alongside the usual farm animals such as cows, chickens.
Besides pigs, the property also featured camels, kangaroos, and emus, a distinctly Australian mix that shaped her early years. Her first ambition was to work with animals, with dreams of becoming a veterinarian. However, school work experience in Kalgoorlie, Olympic Games, where she and her siblings had to live away from their parents to study, changed her perspective.
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Olympic Tickets: An Unlikely Path to Bobsleigh
Dealing with sick animals proved emotionally challenging, and she began looking for a different path. That shift led her toward conservation. Olympic Tickets, Reddingius set her sights on becoming a keeper at Perth Zoo and enrolled in a conservation wildlife biology degree at a university in Perth. Moving to the city marked another major transition, taking her even farther from the place where she grew up.
In her first year at university, Reddingius decided to take up sport, largely as a way to meet people and build a social life in an unfamiliar environment. That decision eventually steered her toward bobsleigh, a sport she had never imagined practising as a child in the desert. Now, more than three decades after growing up amid red earth and wide skies.
Reddingius regularly hurtles down icy tracks in Europe and North America alongside pilot Bree Walker in the two-woman bobsleigh. Together, they are chasing qualification for a second Olympic Winter Games appearance at Milano Cortina 2026. Ahead of the 2025–26 season, Reddingius spoke to Olympics.com by video call as preparations intensified.
The opening IBSF World Cup event at the newly built Cortina d’Ampezzo track in November will double as a test event for the 2026 Games and offer valuable qualification points. For Reddingius, the journey from the Australian outback to the frozen curves of Olympic Tickets tracks remains extraordinary. Yet it all traces back to that.
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