Olympic champion Kelsey Mitchell back on her bike after Winter Games appearance in bobsled

A new velodrome in her backyard drew Olympic track cycling champion Kelsey Mitchell back to the sport.

After competing for Canada in bobsled in February’s Milan Cortina Games, the 32-year-old from Sherwood Park, Alta., is back on two wheels at the new Alberta Velodrome in Edmonton.

The cycling track in the new $153-million Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre opened in January. It’s one of three 250-metre indoor UCI-sanctioned tracks in Canada.

The velodrome in Milton, Ont., built for the 2015 Pan American Games, is the national team’s training centre. The Centre National De Cyclisme was completed in Bromont, Que., in 2022.

Mitchell captured women’s Olympic sprint gold in Tokyo in 2021. She didn’t even own a bike when she was recruited into the sport four years earlier through RBC Training Ground.

After placing eighth in Paris in 2024, Mitchell said she was mentally and physically burned out. But she wasn’t ready to abandon the life of a high-performance athlete. Mitchell gave speed skating a try, but found her leg power more transferable to pushing a bobsled.

She and pilot Melissa Lotholz from Barrhead, Alta., placed 13th this year in women’s bob in Cortina, Italy.

Mitchell sought more balance and a different environment upon her return to track cycling, which she says the Edmonton velodrome provides.

“I honestly don’t know if I would have come back to cycling if it wasn’t for this facility,” Mitchell said.

“I struggled a bit finding the work-life balance. I’m an all-in kind of person, and so being out in Milton, I did nothing else except train. That obviously worked out really well, but I think it had a downfall towards the later half of my career.”

Edmonton’s hardwood track on which she trains three days a week is 30 minutes from her door in Sherwood Park. When Mitchell isn’t at the track, she can see her parents, siblings and nieces and nephew regularly.

“Everyone’s here, and now all my friends are having babies, so I’m around for all of that,” Mitchell said. “It’s just cool to be back around everyone because I’ve been gone for the last seven years.”

After the Winter Olympics, Mitchell also wanted to address and rehabilitate a longstanding issue in her left leg that robbed it of power. She had a platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injection in April before getting on the bike in earnest.

She needs to hit a national standard time, which she plans to attempt Aug. 31, for inclusion on the Canadian team.

“I’ve been on the track now for a solid month and a half, I’d say. It came back quicker than I thought,” Mitchell said.

“My last big competition was the Olympics, so that was two years ago, but I had ridden the bike a bit about a year and a half ago. Now it’s just getting used to pushing in the corners and being on the track and being in control of my speed.

“I’m getting support from Edmonton and everyone here, but I’m on my own; I’m not on the national team yet. So the first goal is to make a time standard to be brought back onto the national team and then thinking about what the next two years look like going into L.A.”

Mitchell would be a four-time Olympian in a span of seven years if she’s named to Canada’s team bound for Los Angeles in 2028.

Of the 14 athletes who have represented Canada in both Winter and Summer Olympic Games, five were bobsledders, including Mitchell.

The Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre was integrated with the existing Peter Hemingway Aquatic Centre. One of the facility’s attractions for Mitchell is seeing both elite and recreational athletes walk through its doors.

“I love that it’s in Alberta. I love that it’s a little bit at altitude so we have a fast track,” Mitchell said. “I love that it’s a rec centre where people come in and get to see track cycling for the first time and ask questions and then be tempted to come and try the track. It’s introducing a lot of the public to a new sport.

“It gives you hope for sports in Canada for sure because you have to build it and then they will come. When I started track cycling, there was only one regulation-sized velodrome in Canada. Now there are three.”