Talented trio of luge teammates and best friends slide towards world championships at home 

Many of us have probably had the experience while watching the Olympic Winter Games of turning to the person next to us on the couch and asking: “How do you even get into that sport?”

We’re probably talking about a sport we’ve never seen up close—perhaps a sport like luge, in which athletes slide feet-first down an ice track on an open sled, reaching speeds of upwards of 140km/hour. 

But with one legacy of Vancouver 2010 being the Whistler Sliding Centre, it’s perhaps a little bit clearer to Canadians how exposure to a sport like luge can take place.

For 22-year-old Trinity Ellis, who grew up in nearby Pemberton, it was a school field trip to the Whistler Sliding Centre that gave her that first taste of the sport. She loved it right away: “I just kind of never stopped going back.”

For 19-year-old Embyr Lee Susko, who calls Whistler home, luge was introduced even earlier.

“I started when I was six years old, through a Cub Scouts field trip. Both my brothers did it at the time, and I thought they were really cool. So I thought for me to be cool, I should also do luge. And then I kind of just found my love for this sport, as I grew up through it.” 

Another Whistlerite, Caitlin Nash, 21, also got into the sport through Susko’s brothers: “We did a friends and family recruitment night, and I went out with my dad. I did one run, and I was just immediately hooked.”

Ellis, Susko, and Nash have now become three of Canada’s top lugers. All three were under 10 years old when the Olympic Games came to town. Now, they are legacy athletes of those Games, with the Whistler track fostering not only their athletic careers thus far, but also providing the impetus for what has become an incredibly close friendship.

Olympic.ca spoke to the trio while they were in Winterberg, Germany for a FIL World Cup event. All three huddled around one laptop in a hotel room. Behind them was a massive painting of a bicycle, a fact they [and this interviewer] found enormously funny for an interview focused on a very different sport. 

It’s a particularly special season for these three, not only because the next Winter Olympics are one year away, but because this year the FIL World Championships will take place on their home track in Whistler.

“I think I would probably say the three of us, in this generation of athletes, [as] the first group to come out of Whistler, we probably have taken most runs ever down the Whistler track,” said Nash.

Ellis thinks the extra experience on the track will provide a confidence boost at the world championships.

“Racing at home, you have even more pressure and expectations. So it’s very nice to have that kind of confidence to lean back on. We all know that track like the back of our hands. It’s just muscle memory at this point.”

After seven stops on the World Cup circuit, Nash sits in 21st position in the women’s singles standings with Ellis one spot behind her. Susko only joined the two women she now thinks of as older sisters for the last three of those races after competing on the junior circuit. But she will remain with the senior team for the rest of the season.

While luge has been a big part of their lives, it’s still a sport that can be sometimes misunderstood. Nash, Susko and Ellis all agree that the biggest misconception about luge is that you’re just lying down and letting gravity do the work—when that is emphatically not the case.

“It does just look like you’re lying there,” Ellis admitted, “but there’s so much precision and finesse that goes into driving that people don’t really know about.”

When athletes race, they steer their sled by shifting their body weight and pressing into the runners of the sled with their feet. When speeding down the banked curve of a track, athletes can experience a pull that is equal to five times the force of gravity.

“I like to say that if it looks like you’re doing nothing, that person is just really good,” said Nash with a chuckle.

Despite their young age, the three athletes have already absorbed a lot of wisdom that likely resonates with athletes of all sports: that there’s beauty in keeping things simple, that having fun is key, and that acknowledging the work that went into one’s past successes is just as important as dreaming of future ones.

“I feel like luge is teaching me every weekend that more is not always better. Learning to master the basics and trust[ing] yourself to be able to execute the things you’ve learned without overdoing it—I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of barriers in my life,” said Nash.

Nash notched a piece of luge history in 2019 when she and Natalie Corless became the first women to compete in a World Cup doubles luge race. At the time, doubles was an open gender event, but only men had ever competed in it.

Susko claims that accomplishment by Nash and Corless as her favourite moment as a luge fan, and that she was inspired by Nash in that moment. It’s an admission that makes Nash choke up a bit, creating a real moment under the watchful eye of the bicycle painting.

Susko, who earned a silver medal at the 2024 Junior World Championships, has learned to keep embodying the same joy as the six-year-old kid who took up luge.

“I feel like you can get really caught up in the racing and training, but when you’re in the moment, you need to remember to enjoy everything you’ve worked for. I’ve been having a lot of fun this season, and honestly, that’s been one of my goals—to keep it lighthearted, because it’s so easy to get down on yourself.”

For Ellis, it’s remembering to appreciate what she has already accomplished when thinking about future goals. She made her Olympic debut at Beijing 2022 where she was the top Canadian in the women’s singles event, placing 14th. Ellis was also part of Canada’s sixth-place finish in the team relay. In 2024, she finished fifth at the U23 world championships.

“I’m still really young in the luge world, but I think I’m coming up on my sixth season on the World Cup circuit, which is kind of crazy. But it’s also cool that I can look back and see what I was able to do at a really young age. I’ve been trying to carry that confidence with me in the past couple years, that [I’m] capable of a lot more than you might think, and looking back on past proof of that.”

They’re legacy athletes of the Vancouver 2010 Games, but Nash, Susko, and Ellis are also paving the way (the track? the ice?) for the next generation of luge athletes, leading with the example that success in sport is amazing, but it’s so much better when you cherish the relationships you make along the way.

Or, as Nash puts it: “These are friendships that will last a lifetime.” 

Rapid fire with Trinity, Embyr, and Caitlin

O.ca: Do you have any pre-race rituals or routines?

Embyr: I put my right glove on and then my left glove and then I put my left thumb thing on and zip it up, and then I put my right thumb thing on and zip it up, and that’s like, crucially, a routine.

Caitlin: You can look over and she’s making an L to check her left and right! I had to eradicate my superstitions…they were getting out of hand. Now my superstition is to not have a superstition.

Trinity: I have my routine for warm ups and all that, but that’s it.

Caitlin: Okay, I did think of one. This is not pre-race, but for a season. We have a visor, and we put shampoo on it so that it doesn’t fog up. I believe that you can never wash your visor. You can’t rinse it out, because that will rinse all the experience off of it.

Embyr: I feel a bit that way about washing suits. I typically only wash my suit at the end of the season, because I fear it washes the knowledge.

O.ca: Who’s an athlete you look up to?

Embyr: Marielle Thompson. She’s been my athlete to look up to for a really long time. And now I work out in the gym with her, so it’s really cool.

Caitlin: Mine is the same as Embyr, Marielle. I’ve always looked up to her, and she’s local as well. Her dad taught at our high school, and she’s involved in the community as well. I said Marielle in an interview last year, and I posted that interview on my [Instagram] story. I didn’t realize that you could hear me say that Marielle was my favourite athlete, and she responded to my story and was like, “wait, did you say my name?”

[Hello, Marielle Thompson, if you’re reading this!]

Trinity: Mine is another ski cross athlete, Brittany Phelan. I think probably for us, since they’re Whistler local athletes, we’ve been growing up watching them. We don’t really have any of our own lugers to look up to here. 

O.ca: But you will be those people for others to look up to! What’s your favourite place to race?

Trinity: Favourite place to race is Whistler, at home. My favourite track Königssee, which has been out of commission but is coming back. 

Embyr: My favourite track to race on is Whistler. But my favourite place I’ve raced is in the French Alps at La Plagne.

Caitlin: My favourite track is Königssee, same as Trin. My favourite place is Oberhof. Two years ago we were there for world championships and the crowd that came out was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It was shoulder to shoulder all the way down the track. I think seeing that level of support and fan base for our sport was really cool. And they have bratwurst.

You can buy tickets to watch Trinity Ellis, Caitlin Nash, Embyr Lee Susko and the rest of Team Canada race in-person at the 2025 FIL World Championships taking place February 6-8 in Whistler, B.C.