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RFH 2010, Cover Stories, Colgate News

Katherine Bertine: One Woman. One Bookstore and An Olympic Tale

Tue, Oct 19, 2010

Katherine Bertine: One Woman. One Bookstore and An Olympic Tale

How many people get paid to drop everything else in their life to chase the improbable dream of making it to the Olympics?

Only one that we know of and Kathryn Bertine, a 1997 Colgate grad and former figure skater, was at the Colgate Bookstore Monday night to explain how it happened. And, how she now holds dual citizenship in the US and St. Kits and Nevis, one country on two islands in the Caribbean.

She also discussed and signed her second memoir, "Good As Gold: 1 Woman. 9 Sports. 10 Countriesand a 2-year Quest to Make the Summer Olympics."

After Colgate and graduate school in Arizona, Bertine was a successful professional tri-athlete (in competitions in which she swam, ran and bicycled) and "just squeaking by in every other area" of her life.

"It was time to grow up," said Bertine. "But I had no idea what that meant."

She got some help.

Editors at ESPN -- the sports media empire -- were discussing what it takes to make it to the Olympics. That led to them hiring Bertine, who they knew as a capable freelance writer, to take two years to try to make it to the 2008 Olympic Games as an athlete. She could try to make it there in any sport, and as it turned out, from any country, and they would chronicle her efforts.

Read the entire So You Wanna be an Olympian from ESPN.

On the ultimate Plimpton-esque assignment, Bertine eliminated those sports she had no sot at: gymnastics, diving, basketball. She focused on some of the sports that are contested only on the fringes of the spotlight: race walking, team handball, open water swimming, modern pentathlon.

She told the bookstore audience about trying those sports -- and even luge, a winter sport -- without success. And, about how one-third of her triathlon experience -- cycling -- wound up being her sport of choice.

While she didn't make the US team -- they take just three riders -- her ESPN editors reminded her that they never said she had to make the US team. Any team would do.

Bertine explained she reached out to about 60 countries that had men's cycling but no female team. She said she offered them a deal: give her the opportunity to qualify for the Olympics and she would, in return, help create a woman's cycling program and one for youths in their country.

"Many said thanks, but no thanks," according to Bertine.

But, one day while cleaning her email spam folder, she found a replay from St. Kits and Nevis in the Carribean. They were interested and a meeting was planned.

It took several months for their answer, but it was positive and it gave Bertine several months to hopscoth the globe to enter enough races to meet qualifying standards.

She did not reveal the ending of her story to the crowd at the bookstore Monday, but made it clear she thoroughly enjoyed her Olympian quest.

Now, at 35 and due to be married by month's end, Bertine competes in cycling for a second-tier team in Arizona. She hopes to race in the 2012 Olympics in London for St. Kits and Nevis. And, she has received tremendous support from the international cycling community in supprt of her eforts to get kids off the streets of St. Kits and Nevis and onto bicycles.

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