Rivals at curling; comrades on the frontline of the pandemic.
After two years of helping patients battle COVID-19, two nurses – Nina Roth, vice skipper of the US curling team, and Vicky Wright, vice skipper of the British curling team – temporarily swapped their scrubs for the limelight of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Unlike the highly paid stars we associate with elite-level sport, these two nurses had combined the high-stress environment of nursing in a pandemic with intense training for their shot at Olympic glory.
“It all feels like a blur now, but you just get your head down and go on,” Wright told Sports Illustrated. “You have good days, you have bad days, just like in sport.
And same as having great teammates on the ice, the support’s there, you work together, and you come out with a solution.”
Roth has worked for a decade at a critical illness recovery centre; Wright is a surgical nurse at Forth Valley Royal Hospital in Scotland.
As the pandemic broke, Wright was about to start competing at the world championships in Canada in March 2020, but flew home instead and threw herself into the fray against COVID.
In Beijing, Great Britain beat the US in a preliminary game, but both nurses bonded after all they had endured during the previous 24 months.
“After all, in a sense, they’re part of the same team,” enthused Sports Illustrated.
Vicky went on to win the gold.