31-year old Akwasi Frimpong has started a journey that he hopes will take him to PyeonChang and complete a process that has been ongoing for 5 years.

In 2012, he was part of the Dutch pre-Olympic sprint team but a tendon injury ruled him out of the Games in London.

But what do you do when you cannot run in the sunshine? Forget about your dream and try to live your life? That may be the answer for other athletes but for Akwasi Frimpong, he decided to compete in the snow.

“I got the opportunity to be part of the Dutch bobsled team and I was the brakeman, the guy at the back of the bobsled who had the speed,” he told Citi Sports in an interview from his training base in Utah.

(Bobsled or bobsleigh is a sport which requires a team to be in a bobslep; a capsule-like device which zooms around a track at amazing speeds.)

The pace developed on the running track was going to be put to good use.

However, he could not go to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia and it was time to think about school and books in the United States.

But after advice from one of his coaches, he decided to take up the skeleton event. The event is a single-athlete sport in which the competitor has to lie face down on a board and race down a track at a great speed.

It seems speed and Akwasi Frimpong have always had a lifelong relationship.

At age 15, he met athletics and he liked it. That was 7 years after he arrived in Amsterdam with his parents from Ghana.

Now, he is hoping to blow past opponents and clocks on his way to the Winter Games.

Headline stuff, isn’t it? But that too is not new to Frimpong.

After all, his mother made the newspaper front pages and top chart positions from her many wonderful gospel songs in Ghana

His mother? Yes. The very popular Esther Amoako, who gave Ghanaians songs like ” Keep On Praying”, “He Can Do It”, “He Is Alive” and “Metrimupo”.

The motivational and inspirational fuel that is primordial for his journey seems covered on that score but Frimpong knows that getting to South Korea will require more than heavenly intervention.

He recognises the work he has to put in and he is getting all the help needed to send him to the big time.

“It may be a one-man sport but I have a team that is helping me. I have different coaches dealing with different things. For instance, I have a sliding coach who is taking me through the work of navigating the sled around the course.

It has taken me about six years to learn that well because it is a finesse sport. I do a lot of speed training to help me with my start. I am very good at that and I need to work on it. I also work in terms of lifting weights but I am keeping an eye on that so that my upper body is right for the sled.”

He is also getting a lot of support from the United States skeleton sport team and that pleases him greatly as he aims to be in the world’s top 60 by January 2018 so that he can head to the Winter Games.

He has plans of competing in several competitions for the needed points and experience.

Already, he has won medals in several competitions such as the 2017 IBSF World Championships, the 2013 Americans Cup and the 2012 Gold GoldenSprint Challenge Invitational.

Off the track, Frimpong’s efforts are being heavily supported by Cocoa From Ghana, who are sponsoring him.

Unique in his own right

Frimpong is not the first Ghanaian to go on the snow of the Winter Games.

In 2010, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong was at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver in the skiing event but Frimpong’s journey speaks of a man who has not allowed himself to be put down and he has found ways to re-invent himself.

He says the 2022 Games is his major target and he wants to chart the path for the younger generation so that that they can also go on the snow and shine and he is living those words through his work with Right To Dream Netherlands as an ambassador.

“If I can do it, anybody in Ghana can do the same thing. My biggest goal is to get more Ghanaian kids to get into Winter sports.”

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By: Nathan Quao/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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