Nicole Burger: ‘Growing up, I just wanted to compete for my country’<\/p>\n
Before throwing her full weight into snow sports, Burger fostered hopes of representing South Africa in rugby sevens with the aim of making it to the Olympics. Burger reached out to a South African sevens coach, but her hopes were ultimately dashed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have loved to compete for my country in athletics or rugby at some point. Especially when I was doing athletics, I was always trying to get to the top, especially when I was quite close,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was like quite high up there [with athletics], so it wasn’t too far out of reach until injuries started niggling in. And then with rugby as well, that would have been incredible.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I was growing up, I just wanted to compete for my country; it didn’t matter where, it didn\u2019t matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n
The opportunity would finally present itself through the RAF in a sport that she never thought about while growing up. After the global COVID-19 pandemic, Burger explored the different sporting codes offered through the\u00a0RAF and the UK military. A social media post for a bobsleigh and skeleton \u2018taster\u2019 caught her eye, with no experience required, involving a 40-metre sprint and a run on a dry push track.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to be pretty fast doing heptathlon and stuff, and I was like, \u2018Ah, I’ll give it a go, it\u2019s a day out of the office, and I get to try something new\u2019. I always liked the expression that ‘shy kids don’t get any sweets’, you’ve got to ask to be able to get something or try something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nicole Burger: ‘Growing up, I just wanted to compete for my country’ Before throwing her full weight into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237254,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-237253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}