YANQING, China — Alexandra Burghardt adjusted her new Winter Olympics outfit in a hotel a few miles away from the bobsledding track in the mountains outside Beijing.
“Sometimes I feel like a double agent,” she said. “Two lives to handle.”
In August, Burghardt was running the 100 meters in the blazing heat of Tokyo’s Summer Olympics. Now, six months later, she found herself in subzero temperatures in China, suiting up for the bobsled in the Winter Games.
She joins a long line of sprinters turned bobsledders, runners whose explosive speed and strength on the track can translate to the ice.