Kaia Hatton has trained at the Whistler Sliding Centre (WSC) since 2015 as one of many young athletes in the facility’s development pipeline. She recently took a big leap forward in her career, being named to Team Great Britain for the upcoming Winter Youth Olympics in Gangwon.
At 14 years old, Kaia will not only be the youngest of 31 athletes Britain is sending to South Korea this month, but also the youngest luger ever to represent the Union Jack at a major international event. She’ll be competing directly against two other WSC racers wearing Canadian livery: Ava Lucia Huerta and Maya Yuen. (A third, Bastian van Wouw, will drop in amongst men).
To say Kaia is thrilled would be a bit of an understatement.
“It’s super exciting. I never thought that I’d be able to go to an Olympics, and these aren’t the [big] Olympics but they’re still pretty cool,” she remarked. “I didn’t think I’d get this far in the sport, at this age. I just think [racing in Korea] is going to be good for new life experiences and meeting new people.”
Kaia has already met many of her compatriots via a meet-and-greet in England some weeks ago. As the only luger of the bunch, she’s brushed shoulders with ice dancers, figure skaters and hockey players alike, and looks forward to sharing an international spotlight with them. Her dad is over the moon, too, and with good reason.
Mark Hatton raced in two Olympic Games—2002 in Salt Lake City and 2006 in Torino—over the course of a 12-year luge career that also saw him win a pair of Commonwealth Games gold medals. Sliding is in the family’s blood, and today he coaches his daughter along with several other youngsters in Whistler.
“I’m really proud of [Kaia],” said Mark. “She has exceeded her own expectations this year and she is having so much fun sliding and going fast right now, which is what it’s all about. She has been surrounded by luge her entire life, so it’s not really a surprise that she went into the family business!”
‘10 times more fun’
Kaia grew to love the speed of sliding at a very young age—after all, there’s not many opportunities for a teenage girl to feel the adrenaline rush 125 kilometres/hour can bring. She might not have stayed the course, however, without the WSC’s quality of ice and instruction.
“Peter Iliev, my other coach right now [who’s a two-time Olympian from Bulgaria], he’s so good at teaching us how to interpret what’s coming at us when it’s just so fast,” Kaia said. “The medics are so friendly and all the athletes are friends with them. They’ll come up the outrun, give us high fives and ask how our run was, and they take such good care of you if anything goes wrong. The announcer on the PA system is such a great person, too.
“It makes the sport 10 times more fun when you actually enjoy it with people you love around you, and people that are there to care for you.”
Kaia also notes a harmonious relationship between Luge Canada and the Great Britain Luge Association, which allows her to train and travel with her longtime WSC teammates even though she now wears a different country’s colours on race day. Above all, she looks to her dad for guidance and inspiration.
“We’re definitely very close, and we spend a lot of time with each other,” Kaia said. “I like when he coaches me, because we can have such open conversations and we can get so deep into it. He understands what I like, what I don’t like, and we understand each other, so I think we make a pretty good team.”
Kaia and her fellow lugers hit the ice on Jan. 20 in Gangwon. She eagerly awaits her first training run on a new track and hopes to ultimately place in the top 10.
