It was a complete contrast from nearly a year ago, when the Ray Brook native, who competes on the women’s national luge team, found out her father, Jim, had cancer.

She admits that her father is the sole reason she got into the sport, so when he ultimately died a couple of months later, life became tough. She struggled to sleep and eat, all while training for luge.

“I just felt so fatigued, and I didn’t lift as much as I normally do in the summer,” Kirkby said. “I would even take Wednesdays off because I was too weak and skinny.”

But in August, something just clicked. Kirkby doesn’t exactly know what happened, but she’s glad it did.

She is now coming off a historic luge season that resulted in her, alongside her doubles partner Chevonne Forgan, placing third overall in the FIL World Cup standings. They became the only women’s doubles team from the United States to ever do so, since the sport was added to the World Cup circuit in 2021.

“My dad would have been so proud,” Kirkby said, who is now training for the upcoming Milano-Cortina Olympic Winter Games.

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A journey

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Kirkby remembers the first time she went down the luge track at Mount Van Hoevenberg vividly. Even as an 8-year-old, she knew it didn’t go well.

“I hit like four walls on each side in the Chicanes, which is the bended straight away,” she said. “I hated it, and I thought I’d be done after that.”

But when her father, who bobsledded with the Air Force in the late 1970s, asked her how it went, she didn’t want to let him down. She nervously told him that it went well.

“He said, ‘Oh, do you want to take another one?’ so I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I just kept doing it,” Kirkby said. “Then it worked and eventually I did start liking it, but being an 8-year-old and hitting some walls for the first time, I didn’t want to do that again. You know what, I hit walls again the second time. You’ve got to hit walls to learn not to hit them.”

From then on, Kirkby dedicated her time to luge, competing for several years as a singles slider on USA Luge’s junior and youth teams. That was until her coach suggested switching to doubles, alongside Forgan, during the coronavirus pandemic.

Kirkby said the duo wasn’t the first-ever U.S. women’s doubles luge team, but they were the first ones to make the U.S. National team … by one day.

“Because it was a two-day World Cup happening in La Plagne, France,” Kirkby said. “Chevonne and I got bronze the first day, because they did a double World Cup both in one weekend, and then Maya (Chan) and Reannyn (Weiler) got bronze the following day. So that put them on the National team.”

Since the switch, Kirkby and Forgan have won numerous World Cup medals, including seven last season across the women’s doubles, mixed doubles and team relay events. During the World Championships, they earned a bronze medal in women’s doubles and a silver in relay.

But the highlight of this past season came in her first race of the year, and the first without her dad. Kirkby dealt with a flood of emotions, but that race just so happened to be her best. She and Forgan secured their first-ever World Cup gold medal in women’s doubles and set a track record.

“I was also a little bit pissed because this the first World Cup that my dad didn’t watch because he passed away last year and he missed the gold medal,” she said. “And he would’ve been happy with it. My mother was very happy with it.”

She said her mother, Arina, is now a full-time supporter of her luge career. Kikrby said in the past her mother would get nervous watching her race, as most parents would watching their child flying down a luge track at nearly 70 mph.

“Now, she’ll stay up late and she’ll wake up at 3 in the morning because the races are happening in Europe at 9 a.m., so it’ll be 3 a.m. here,” she said.

Kirkby now owns an FIL World Cup crystal ball for her third-place overall finish this past season, it’s something she didn’t know was possible.

“From an early age, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I never had one of those, and I would have been happy,” she said. “But now, I’m really happy.”

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Off-ice and hobbies

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During Kirkby’s free time, she’s often by a kiln, or in the summertime riding a motorcycle.

She loves ceramics. It’s something she’s been doing since she was 6 or 7, after attending a handful of children’s classes at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts. During her high school years, she’d make pottery during her study halls at the Saranac Lake High School.

“Whenever I’m back in the states, I go to the art center and make pottery,” she said. “I just love how useful it is because I can make so many things.”

Kirkby said she’s in the process of making a garlic grater for her luge teammate Ashley Farquharson. She also makes shot glasses, mugs, earrings, magnets and pretty much anything she can.

Oftentimes, she turns them into gifts for her friends and teammates.

“I made Jonny (Gustafson) a mug for his birthday recently. Emily (Sweeney) and Ashley both got mugs,” Kirkby said.

Currently, she’s working on mostly earrings and magnets — the smaller stuff. But she’s hoping to start selling some of her ceramics this summer. She tried last year, after kickstarting her own business, but it failed, and she’s hoping to learn from it.

“It was an LLC, and I dissolved it recently, and now I’ve started a new business with ceramics,” she said.

Kirkby has always been doing school online, for pretty much the time she graduated from high school to now.

“I’ll finally graduate from North Country Community College this spring with my associate’s (degree), then after this I’ll work toward my bachelor’s in business administration,” she said.

With the Olympics on the horizon, Kirkby said she may even want to try selling her ceramics at the Games.

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Let the training begin

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Training for the upcoming luge season began on Monday, according to Kirkby, and it won’t stop until the Olympics. She said she only had two weeks off from when she finally got back home to the start of training season.

“It’s like all my weekends built up into one vacation,” she said. “Now, we’re going to start training. It’s just a lot of body work and getting back into it. Then we’re going to start going harder pretty soon.”

Kirkby said training as a doubles slider is pretty the same as training for doubles. With Kirkby as the bottom woman on the sled, and Forgan on top, the only difference between what they do is some exercises.

“We work on slightly different arm movements, but the United States Olympic Committee has set up a really good training system for us in Lake Placid,” she said. “We have a bunch of lifting platforms, and that has been very handy with all of Team USA Luge training in the same location, at the same time. It’s very convenient for us, and I get to lift Chevonne. I’m on one platform, and she’s on the other. So, if she needs to, she can tell me something.”

Kirkby gives up most of her sight as the bottom person, but she’s OK with that, since she feels more connected to the sled. Forgan is the one who steers the sled, while Kirkby’s job is to save it when she feels like they’re too high or low on the track.

“That’s the style that we have established, and she’s also seeing things,” Kirkby said. “If we flip or crash, we flip onto her. Different women’s doubles (teams) have different styles, I’ve noticed. Another team I know has the bottom woman doing a majority of the steers, while the top woman is lying back and having a good position. That was an interesting thing I learned this year, that some people are doing it differently.”

Kirkby said she’s enjoyed having a doubles partner in her luge journey, because you have someone to go through all the hard times and good times together.

“Because sometimes those hard times can suck, like crashing four times in a row in Sigulda,” she said.

Kirkby said what makes her and Forgan work so well together is their personalities, because they do have similarities, but they are also different.

“I really like how she is precise and she makes sure that things get done and Chevonne is very particular about things, which is great because she works on the sled,” Kirkby said. “My job is to carry the sled; traditionally, a bottom person’s job is to carry the sled and the top person’s job is to do maintenance on the sled as in steel work and running sandpaper on the steel edges, because they get damaged every day going on the track. I do some stuff that she tells me to, ‘I need you to do this, this, this and that’ and just go ‘OK.'”

As far as this upcoming season goes, Kirkby said it’s a goal to break some start records.

“We had one taken, we had a new one broken and we also took Whistler,” she said. “As far as I know, we have four start records in the world right now and two track records and I want more.”