Former Fresno State football star slides into Olympic dream – at a high rate of speed

The skeleton came first, so start there. It’s an Olympic event, a high-speed, high G-force ride down a frozen track that can be quite wicked.

From a running start, the competitor jumps on a small sled and goes barreling down the track headfirst, hitting speeds as high as 80 mph. In the turns, the driver can pull up to 5 Gs – and that’s part of the test.

Want to be a skeleton athlete? One of the first things is to jump on a sled and see if you can thrive on the ride.

“There are elements of chaos in there,” says Nick Vienneau, the skeleton coach at the Utah Olympic Park in Park City.

In that sense, it would seem a perfect fit for Frank Dalena, who flew around the practice field for five years at Fresno State as a walk-on slot receiver.

Except, the San Joaquin Memorial High grad isn’t exactly big on snow, or the cold. “I’ve been to the snow more times playing in football games than I have for recreation. My family, we like to go to the beach every once in a while, but we’re not really snow people.”

He’s not much of an adrenaline-junkie, either. “Some people think it’s like a roller coaster, and I don’t like roller coasters very much.”

But there’s enough of a fit between athlete and sport that Dalena is pursuing a new dream, one that could take to the Olympics.

Skeleton and the college football player

What little he knew about the winter sliding sports – bobsled, luge and skeleton – came from the movies. “I didn’t even know what bobsled was, besides watching ‘Cool Runnings,’” he said.

That’s the 1993 Disney film starring the late John Candy based loosely on the debut of the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Calgary Olympics.

But then there was a class at Fresno State – History of the Olympics.

“It’s just a standard general ed class that the athletic department pretty much put me in,” Dalena says. “It was interesting, because I didn’t really know much about the Olympic Games. But we went through the whole thing and I had a cool teacher who told me that a lot of times those winter sport athletes are transfers over from other summer sports.

“A couple of days went by and he came back and was like, ‘Bobsled is a great example of that for you. There are a lot of ex-college football players, a lot of ex-track stars in it.”

Curiosity piqued, Dalena last summer attended a combine and scored well in testing; 15-, 30- and 45-meter sprints, a broad jump, a shot toss. That led to an invitation to G-Force speed school in Park City. But when the Bulldogs’ fall camp rolled around, his attention turned completely to football.

Taking the skeleton hits

By the end of the football season, Dalena was immersed in skeleton training at the Utah Olympic Park.

There’s a learning curve to it, of course.

“That first time down,” says Vienneau, the skeleton coach, “you bounce off the walls a few times, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know when the ride’s going to end.”

And through it all, speed is the goal.

“There is no Pop Warner of learning how to skeleton,” Dalena says. “They push you down the mountain and it’s, ‘Hold-on, brother, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

“There is no stopping; you have to go. It’s hard to bomb a hill going 80 and get it the first time, and the shots you take. … I wasn’t expecting the hits I’ve taken in skeleton. They are abusive. It tears you up.

“At first the speed can be a little eerie – it was for me. But now that I’m used to going fast, you want to go fast.”

Fast on the track, then coronavirus

Dalena, who played on the Bulldogs’ 2018 Mountain West Conference championship team, is getting there.

In just a few months on a skeleton, and starting his runs from halfway, three-quarters of the way down the track, he made it to the top of the course. He knocked six full seconds off his best time, start to finish, and competed last month at the Western Regionals and the Utah Games at the Park City track.

“Some guys, they don’t even make it running from the top in their first year,” Dalena says. “I’m running from the top rather fast and I don’t even know how to run. Once I started getting these good times, I thought, ‘I haven’t even implemented the actual reason I might be good at this – the athleticism part of it.’

“It gets you excited. I want to get after it, get the running part down and now that I know how to drive decently well at least. The next step is to get some better equipment, and we’re going to be in business. But it’s all happened very fast.”

So, what now, with sports shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic?

Dalena is intent on going as fast as he possibly can on a skeleton, and seeing how far it can take him. The Olympic Games, obviously, is the goal.

He is back in Fresno, just built a sled with skateboard wheels that he can use to work on his push starts, his speed at the top of the track.

“It’s so awkward running with that sled,” Dalena says. “I want to get as many reps as I can with it.”

There is another combine in June. The Push Championships are in September. All of it, pending at this point.

So Dalena is home for now, training, which was a fairly easy call. “I could quarantine in my little apartment in Salt Lake City or I could come home and quarantine … and my mom is a much better cook than I am.”

Fast enough for the Olympics?

But it eventually will circle back to the winter, and putting together the start and driving.

Navigating the track is tricky and the number of reps is limited. Unlike football where he could run a pass route 100 times on a summer day, Dalena over the past few months had to get the most out of two or three runs a day down the track at the Olympic Park.

Ice conditions matter. There also is the physical toll, absorbing every hit sliding along at 80 mph. It takes precision, Vienneau says.

“When you watch the Olympics, you see these guys and girls go down and they make it look pretty easy, but there’s a lot going on with that sled to enable them to get those graceful lines down the track,” Vienneau says.

Subtle movements with the knees and shoulders twist the sled into and out of turns

“You have to rely on your sense of timing. You have to rely on your sense of feeling,” Vienneau says. “You don’t want to do more steering than you have to because that cuts ice and that slows you down.

“You’re striving for as close to perfection as you can get.”

Fastest down the track wins.

“I was never an adrenaline junkie who wanted to send it down a hill at 80 mph headfirst, at all. I was never in that mindset,” Dalena says. “Someone popped it into my mind that I had the athletic ability, and an opportunity to potentially represent my country one day.

“I was at the right age and had athletic ability. I had more left in me after college football – it was the right time, right place, right opportunity. I’m going for it.”

This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 1:32 PM.