In February 2018, West Farmington native Haidyn Bunker and her family were watching the Winter Olympics when they saw an advertisement for a free, one-day tryout for the luge in Columbus. Her interest piqued, Bunker, 10 years old at the time, made the trip down to the state’s capital to try something she had never done before.

“I didn’t totally know what I was getting myself into,” Bunker admitted.

The tryout, which consisted of rolling down a blacktop hill on top of a modified sled, went well enough for Bunker to earn an invite months later to Lake Placid, New York, to train on one of only two full-size, Olympic-style tracks in the entire country. That training session turned into another and several more after that, and now, six years after watching the Olympics, Bunker can call herself a Youth Olympian.

Bunker, now a 16-year-old sophomore at Chardon High School, recently competed in South Korea in the women’s doubles luge at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympics, which gathered the best athletes from around the world between the ages of 15 and 18 years old.

Taking part in the event was a goal six years in the making for Bunker, who has set out and achieved several milestones throughout her luge career. The first of those was making the U.S. developmental team, something she accomplished a little bit over a year after her initial tryout in Columbus.

With one goal realized, Bunker turned her attention to the Youth Olympics.

“Once I was on that [developmental] team, I started to learn a little bit more about what my career path would be like. And I learned about the Youth Olympics at the age of 11 years old, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna go. I have to go. That looks like just such a wonderful experience that I want to experience,'” Bunker said.

An athlete at heart, Bunker began her luge career as a singles competitor, but she eventually transitioned to doubles, which was exactly what she wanted anyways.

“I started learning more about women’s doubles luge, and I was like, ‘This looks so fun.’ It just adds a little more of an adventure to it,” Bunker said.

After her first partner decided to step away from the sport, Bunker eventually became partnered with Sadie Martin, someone Bunker said she had a strong friendship with before hopping on the sled together.

“She is absolutely wonderful. We’ve been really good friends for many years, before doubles and everything, which is one of the biggest parts of double luge. It’s that connection with your partner that you have if you’re going to make the sled work as one,” Bunker said.

Bunker and Martin managed to qualify for the Youth Olympics, which Bunker admitted was an intimidating experience considering all of the best athletes, with top-notch equipment and training, were present.

“It was definitely a lot more pressure to go to the [Youth] Olympics. … But as an athlete, especially as a luge athlete, you have to put that past behind you and you have to focus on yourself and the present to make your goal.”

In South Korea, Bunker and Martin set a goal for themselves: “Make it down clean.”

But they learned a valuable lesson in their Youth Olympics journey.

“We learned not everything goes our way,” Bunker said.

Each race consists of two runs, and in Bunker and Martin’s first run, they made it down in 52.890 seconds. But in the second and final run, things didn’t go as well.

“Our second run unfortunately crashed, so we didn’t finish the race. And that definitely was a big shock to us; we just didn’t expect to do that. It upset us for a little bit,” Bunker said. “But we’ve got bigger and better things that we can focus on now. One crash, one race doesn’t define us. We definitely learned a lot about that.”

With the Youth Olympics behind them, Bunker and Martin are now striving to be selected for the junior national team, which would be another step up in competition. To do so, they will have to continue to impress the U.S. junior coaches at an event in early March in Lake Placid. If they do not earn a spot on the team, Bunker said they will just have to “try a little harder” and attempt to make next year’s team.

For Bunker, though, who plays for Chardon’s softball and soccer teams in addition to her luge exploits, she would like to go much further with her luge career than just the junior national team.

“The end-all, be-all goal is the Olympics. Every athletic kid from the age of five is just like, ‘Oh, I want to be in the Olympics.’ And even when I was younger, I didn’t even know what luge was at that point,” Bunker said. “But my main goal is to make it to the Olympics.”

pbyers@tribtoday.com