Mark Greaves

Spiritual athletics

Sister Catherine Holum, nun and former Olympic speed-skater, on the connections between sport and the religious life

Sister Catherine Holum remembers her first Olympic speed-skating race very clearly. The crowd, she says, was very loud. Three men with television cameras knelt in front of her as she tied her skates up. She felt the whole world was watching. And when she had finished the race, she burst into tears.

At the time — it was the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan — she was only 17. She had come from an Olympic family: her mother was a gold medallist and a US star coach. Sister Catherine — or Kirstin, as she was then — was hyped up as a prodigy, destined for greatness. Then she retired.

I meet her at a care home in north London, where she is staying briefly. She is a diminutive figure in a thick Franciscan habit. Her oval spectacles protrude under a smart black veil.

She is, like many young nuns, smiley and joyful and warm. She makes me feel like I am great company even if I am not saying anything. She laughs often, as sociable people do.

As we sit down Sister Catherine sips a glass of water while I help myself to tea and biscuits. I ask her when she started speed-skating and she explains about her mother, Dianne Holum, a champion skater who coached three US Olympic teams. ‘I was always at the rink with her,’ she says. ‘She took me everywhere.’ So she started skating when she was seven, and competed internationally at the age of 13.

The ‘turning point’, she says, came at 16, when she went on a pilgrimage to Fatima, Portugal. She was walking arm in arm with her cousin at the spot where, in 1917, three children apparently saw the Virgin Mary, and all of a sudden she heard the words, ‘You are going to be a sister.’

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