Meet Alex Comber, an Unlikely Favourite for the Winter Olympics

If Alex Coomber can remember her first attempt at bob skeleton like it was yesterday, that is because it was, give or take a year.

There are skiers here who were on the slopes as soon as they could crawl and skaters who have been practising since pre-school. But Coomber took up skeleton only in 1997 and became three-time World Cup champion in under five years. Now the 28-year-old RAF intelligence officer is on the threshold of becoming Britain's first winter Olympic gold medallist since Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean bewitched Sarajevo in 1984.

"My confidence built up very, very quickly," said Coomber, an understatement because within 11 days of her first attempt she finished fifth in a World Cup. The speed of her progress initially raised suspicions within the sport.

She was regularly drug-tested and officials were always checking her sled to ensure she did not have a small engine concealed inside it. "They thought I must be cheating. No one from Britain wins winter sports, for God's sake," said Coomber.

No one doubts Coomber now, though. "Alex is the one we will all be shooting at," said Tristan Gale of the United States yesterday. "She has proved time and again she's the most consistent of all and must start as the favourite."

To underline that, Coomber won a warm-up contest at Britain's training camp in Calgary on Sunday, easily beating a main rival, Russia's Ekaterina Mironova, by 1.5 seconds.

Yet when Coomber attended a come-and-try-it training camp in Igls, Austria, she recalls: "I really wanted to do luge, but there were no spaces, so I tried skeleton."

Coomber - who was born in Antwerp, brought up in Sussex and now lives in Somerset - sometimes has trouble seeing herself winning gold. "People like me don't become Olympic champions," she said. "I'm just an ordinary person."

Bob skeleton - belly-down, head-first sledding on what looks like a tea tray - is returning to the Games after appearing only twice, in 1928 and 1948. Britons won medals both years, but the event's riskiness kept it in the deep freeze. By the early 80s thrill-seekers rediscovered the 115-year-old sport, which was introduced in St Moritz by an Englishman known only as Child. It returned, as a demonstration event, in 1998 at Nagano. It is named after the skeleton-like metal frame of the first sleds, not what might happen if things go wrong.

What it is like hurtling down a sheet of ice at 80mph? "The first time I got to the bottom it was absolutely terrifying," said Coomber, "but I couldn't wait to get back and try again." Her worst injury is a chin wound requiring a few stitches.

Skeleton sleds are a smooth slab of steel and fibreglass and have no brakes, just tubular steel runners attached to a chassis about three feet long. With their helmeted heads only inches above the ice, racers will hold their arms straight back, shift their body weight, and occasionally drag a toe to steer through the 15 hair-raising turns on the Olympic Park's 4,400ft track.

"It's impossible to come out of a skeleton track. It's very unlikely you'll break your neck. You're far more likely to break a rib, a hand or a foot. But personally I think rugby is more dangerous."

At 8st and 5ft 3in, Coomber is ideally built for skeleton. "The size of the sled is wider than I am, so the bumpers go out further than the shoulders," she explained. "People who are bigger come with bumps, bruises and scrapes."

Coomber often has to travel abroad to practise on ice. In Britain she sometimes trains on a sled made by her husband Eric, a tea-tray fitted with skateboard wheels and the handles from a disabled toilet.

But Coomber is the envy of many rivals. She now has an advanced steel-sprung, carbon-fibre sled that could be the difference between gold - and celebrity - and nowhere.

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