After a devastating finish in the 2014 Winter Olympics, John Daly retired from skeleton racing. In 2016, he decided to make a comeback and was able to earn a spot on the 2018 U.S. Olympic men’s skeleton team. Jerry Swope for The Wall Street Journal
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An Olympic Daredevil’s Uphill Battle

U.S. Olympian John Daly gave up on skeleton, but decided to give the sport and its grueling training one more shot for the Pyeongchang Games

After a devastating finish in the 2014 Winter Olympics, John Daly retired from skeleton racing. In 2016, he decided to make a comeback and was able to earn a spot on the 2018 U.S. Olympic men’s skeleton team. Jerry Swope for The Wall Street Journal

John Daly credits a first date with getting him to return to a sport where you hurl yourself head first down an icy chute on a tiny sled reaching speeds above 80 miles an hour.

Mr. Daly had made a clean split from the sport after a devastating 2014 Winter Olympics where he skidded from medal contention to 15th place on his final run of the men’s skeleton competition. “I decided to hang up my spandex and re-enter the real world,” he says. He relocated from the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., where he’d...