Canadian Olympian has Estonian lineage

Archived Articles | 09 Feb 2006 | EL (Estonian Life)EWR

Skeleton World Cup champion Melissa Hollingsworth-Richards, a member of the Canadian winter Olympic team at Torino, is a 4th generation descendant of the Mõttus family, who pioneered in the Eckville, Alberta area at the beginning of the last century.

Hollingsworth-Richards started off the 2005-06 campaign strongly, winning her first-ever gold medal in World Cup competition on her home track at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary. She continued to perform strongly by earning the silver medal at the following World Cup race in Lake Placid. That set this year's promising pattern. The 25-year-old athlete clinched this season's overall World Cup title with podium finishes in every race, including two victories.

The World Cup champion is coming off three impressive seasons as part of the dominating Canadian contingent on the World Cup circuit. In 2002-03, she garnered her then best result at the track in St. Moritz, Switzerland where the Canadian women swept the top four spots, taking silver behind teammate Michelle Kelly. Melissa also unleashed an impressive performance last season during the World Cup race in Igls, Austria, where she finished third.

Helgi Leesment, who notified us of Hollingsworth-Richards’ Estonian blood, notes that "Melissa joins her cousin Ryan Davenport, a Canadian of similar Esto lineage, who was world cup skeleton champion several years in succession. Ryan went on to coach the American skeleton racers to top finishes in the last Olympics. Ryan has become one of the premier skeleton sled builders and has world-wide demand for his sleds."

Melissa Hollingsworth-Richards has positioned herself for a medal shot at the Torino Winter Olympics. The podium finishes in every World Cup race this year certainly bode well. Here's wishing her the best of luck!

(For our e-readers, the following two websites best provide more info as well as photographs, alas, of inferior quality for newspaper reproduction, about our Canadian Estonian medal hope: www.bobsleigh.ca and the CBC's rather well designed Olympics page, www.cbc.ca/olympics ,follow the links for sport and athlete.)

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