Nearly a decade after graduating from UVA’s School of Nursing, Lea Ann Parsley-Davenport won a silver medal in skeleton at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. (Contributed photos)
The house in the small town of Granville, Ohio, that Lea Ann Parsley-Davenport grew up in was located just a couple of blocks from the fire department, close enough to hear the town’s emergency sirens sound whenever there was a fire. On those occasions, she would hop on her bike and pedal as fast as she could down to the station.
Being only 11 at the time, Parsley-Davenport wasn’t allowed to fight fires, but she could watch her two older brothers in action as they prepared to go out on the call. And when they returned, she could help wash down the trucks and hoses.
“It was an easy thing to get involved in, and I just loved it,” said Parsley-Davenport, a University of Virginia alumna who still lives in Granville. “It was kind of our way of contributing to our community. A lot of people around here do Scouts or Kiwanis or other community organizations that are part of life in a little town. For us, it was being on the fire department and giving back that way.”
Over the years, firefighting – which would become a labor of love – gave back to Parsley-Davenport. It helped her stay in shape, find a new passion and, in a roundabout way, become an Olympic champion.
In 2002, at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Parsley-Davenport won the silver medal in skeleton – the sliding sport in which a person rides a small sled down a frozen track while lying face down and head-first.
To this day, Parsley-Davenport is the only UVA alum to have ever medaled at a Winter Olympics, according to the UVA Department of Athletics. She is also believed to be the only alum to have ever competed in a Winter Olympics (though you could probably find a few former students who have sledded down Observatory Hill on snow days).
Parsley-Davenport celebrated her Olympic performance with family members in Salt Lake City. (Contributed photo)
Parsley-Davenport, a descendant of the McCoy family – of Hatfield and McCoy fame – starred in basketball and track and field growing up in Granville. At Marshall University, she was a scholarship athlete in both sports.
In basketball, Parsley-Davenport made second-team all-conference and led the nation in free-throw percentage her senior season. In track and field, she was all-conference in high jump and javelin, setting the school record in javelin.
Parsley-Davenport was twice named the Marshall Female Athlete of the Year and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame.
With credentials like that, you’d think she would have had a chance to pursue some type of professional sports career after she graduated in 1990.
However, pro opportunities for women were few and far between. There wasn’t yet a WNBA, and Parsley, while gifted in the high jump and javelin, wasn’t quite good enough to compete against the very best in the world.
Assuming her days of competing were over, Parsley-Davenport set her sights on becoming a nurse – which is what brought her to the UVA School of Nursing in the fall of 1990.
“It was an interesting group of students, because we were from so many different backgrounds and ages,” Parsley-Davenport recalled. “We were not your typical class. As nursing students within the second-degree program, we were kind of a class within a class.
“We had quite a few people in our program who were pursuing nursing as a second career. And so it was a really fun group, because everyone had just so many different experiences. We were kind of our own little clique within the school. We all hung out together and had some really great instructors and professors. We all had really great opportunities to learn. It was just a great experience.”
Having stayed active as a volunteer firefighter throughout her time at Marshall, one of the first things Parsley-Davenport did when she arrived in Charlottesville was join the Seminole Trail Volunteer Fire Department.
“I’d go to class and stay in my dorm room, and then go out to my bunk room out there on weekends,” she said. “I lived at the station as much as I could, and just got to meet some really great people.”
Firefighting helped Parsley-Davenport fill the void of no longer being a college athlete.
“One of the things I always loved about firefighting was that it was a team sport,” said Parsley-Davenport, who became a professional firefighter cadet. “Everyone has a role, and we practice and we drill over and over and over again, so that when a siren goes off everybody knows exactly what to do.
“It feels very much like a sport in that regard.”
Still, it was after graduating from UVA in 1992, while getting her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Ohio State University, when Parsley-Davenport felt she needed to do more to satisfy her competitive juices.
As a senior on the Marshall University basketball team, Parsley-Davenport led the nation in free-throw percentage. (Photos courtesy of Marshall University)
Having watched a former basketball teammate compete in handball at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Parsley-Davenport decided to give the sport a try. She was a quick study, and was in contention for a spot on the squad until suffering a thumb injury.
However, she was invited to be a member of the team’s operations staff and traveled with the team to the 1998 Pan-American Games. One of Parsley-Davenport’s duties was trying to secure sponsors for the team, which, at the time, was underfunded in comparison to the men’s squad, according to Parsley-Davenport. It was while searching online for possible sponsors that she came across a web page that detailed various female winter sports, one of which was bobsled.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute?’ I didn’t even know women were in bobsled,” Parsley-Davenport said. “They weren’t Olympic, but they were trying to be, and I thought, ‘Wow, that looks really fun. I’d really like to give that a try.’
“Believe it or not, the phone number was 1-800-BOBSLED.”
Parsley-Davenport spoke with a recruiter who seemed very excited about her coming out for the sport – until hearing she was 30 years old. It turned out the organization was only looking for high school- and college-aged people whom they could train.
But a still-intrigued Parsley-Davenport decided to drive to the Olympic bobsled training center in Lake Placid, New York anyway. While there, she discovered the skeleton, which last had been an Olympic sport in 1948 and had the same national governing body as bobsledding.
“I fell in love with it,” Parsley-Davenport said. “I was like, ‘This would be a really cool way to continue to do something athletically that I haven’t done before,’ and luckily I was still in good enough physical condition to jump in, even at that age. Firefighting had kept me in shape because the job was very physical and we had done a lot of working out.”
Parsley-Davenport tested well in speed, strength and jumping drills and was encouraged to see what riding a sled felt like.
“Everybody comes from another sport, so the question becomes how quickly can you take what you have – your skills, your abilities – how quickly can you take those from one sport and transfer them to something else?” Parsley-Davenport said.
As it turned out, pretty quickly.
Parsley-Davenport did well on a training sled, and in 1998 she was invited to a training camp in Salt Lake City that had an ice track.
“A lot of people can run really fast on a [cement] track, but then they can’t on ice – so it’s kind of a test to see how well you do on ice,” she said.
Parsley-Davenport was named Ohio Firefighter of the Year in 1999. (Contributed photo)
In Salt Lake City, there were several spots along the track where racers – depending on their age, talent and experience – could begin their descent.
The top of the track was where the best racers started. About halfway down was for juniors. Close to the bottom of the track was for the tourists – and that’s where Parsley-Davenport started.
But over the course of several days, Parsley-Davenport worked her way up to the top. And when she got there, well, that was a ride she’ll never forget.
“The joke was, ‘We’ll know whether you love it or hate it by the sound of your screams,” said Parsley-Davenport, laughing.
“I absolutely loved it. The first ride down I was like, ‘This is awesome.’ It was like a giant water slide that had been frozen. It was just a great feeling. As soon as I crossed the finish line, I said, ‘I’m ready to go back up to the top again.’ I knew that I really, really liked it.
“Skeleton at the time wasn’t an Olympic sport, so I wasn’t getting into it for the Olympic experience. It was just to do something different. My whole life had been basketball and we were threatened within an inch of our life to never be on skis or anything like that, because they don’t want you to get hurt. The coaches were always very adamant about that.”
Parsley-Davenport threw herself into her newfound passion, organizing a training schedule around her nursing and firefighting career. While there was no Olympics to train for, there was a winter World Cup circuit that she began competing in. Essentially, Parsley-Davenport was on the ground floor of a women’s program that was just being developed.
Parsley-Davenport overcame a hamstring injury to earn a silver medal in Salt Lake City. (Contributed photo)
***
Parsley-Davenport was at home working for the Granville Fire Department in 1999 when the call came in. North of town, at the very outskirts of the department’s coverage area, there was a house fire with people trapped inside.
By the time Parsley-Davenport and her unit arrived on the scene, the house was completely engulfed.
Another fire department had arrived first and had directed a teenage girl, who was inside the house, to a first-floor window.
With flames surrounding her, Parsley-Davenport climbed into the window, cradled the girl in her lap and then, almost like a scuba diver dropping out of a boat, rapelled off the side of the house, flinging both herself and the girl into the front yard.
Just as she and the girl landed on the ground, the girl told Parsley-Davenport that her mother was still in the house. Parsley-Davenport raced back in.
“The fireman who had been in there had run out of air, so he couldn’t go back,” Parsley-Davenport said. “So I ran back in while the rest of my crew was working with the hose line, trying to put out as much of the fire as they could.
“I started searching, found her, brought her back to that same window and then did the same thing. It was definitely a team effort … I just happened to be the one who was involved with the mom and the daughter.”
For her efforts, Parsley-Davenport was named Ohio Firefighter of the Year.
In recognizing Parsley-Davenport for the award, Ohio State Firefighters Association Assistant Chief Bernie Obert said, “She is an extraordinary and accomplished person.”
Parsley-Davenport was just getting started.
***
In 2000 came the exciting news that skeleton, along with women’s bobsled, would be added as a sport at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
Parsley-Davenport continued to make Granville her home base, but began traveling frequently to the training center in Lake Placid, as well as to tracks in Salt Lake City and Calgary.
With skeleton officially an Olympic sport, Ryan Davenport – a retired two-time world champion in men’s skeleton from Canada – was brought aboard as the first full-time coach of the U.S. women’s team. The Calgary native, who would marry Parsley-Davenport years later, helped teach her some of the finer points of steering a sled, which can reach speeds in excess of 80 mph.
One of the major challenges for riders is navigating what are known as the “G-force” curves along tracks. Short for gravitational force, G-force is the force caused by an acceleration equal to the acceleration caused by gravity. The strongest G-forces are generated going around severe, banked turns.
Davenport used music to help Parsley-Davenport find her rhythm, with Parsley-Davenport often singing the Beatles song, “Yellow Submarine,” as she sped down the track. Davenport said trying to steer by rhythm is often better than trying to do by sight, especially in Parsley-Davenport’s case.
“Lea Ann was an athlete, but she didn’t have a strong neck,” Davenport said. “Under high G-force, she simply couldn’t hold her head up to get a visual clue as to what was happening. Her face was planted on the ice. … She needed a different way of finding her way through the [curves]. For her, it was timing – and music was a good source for timing.”
As the Olympics crept closer, Parsley-Davenport had established herself as one of the best American racers, yet making it to Salt Lake was so small feat. Only the top three teams in the World Cup standings could bring their two best racers; all the others were only allowed to bring one.
Heading into the final team World Cup race, the U.S. was in fourth, just behind Switzerland, which just happened to be hosting the event in St. Moritz.
“We were up against tough competition, and it was their home track,” Parsley-Davenport said, “but miraculously we pulled it out, earned the second spot, and I got to go.”
Parsley-Davenport’s husband, Ryan, left, was her Olympic coach. (Contributed photo)
In light of her firefighting background and the events of 9/11 that had occurred just a few months before, Parsley-Davenport was one of eight athletes chosen to carry the American flag into the Olympics Opening Ceremony.
“We got to meet the honor guard who brought the flag from New York and spent some time with him prior to walking out onto the ice with the flag,” Parsley-Davenport said. “It was just incredible. In some ways, it was even better than race day.
“My Olympic experience started with those opening ceremonies – and that would have been enough. It really was that amazing. It was like, ‘How does it get any better than this?’”
While Parsley-Davenport knew she was one of the best in the United States in women’s skeleton, she knew she would be going against strong competition from other countries. It was for that reason, coupled with the fact she had been competing with a torn hamstring, that she gave herself only an outside chance of medaling.
“I had done well and won a few World Cup medals,” said Parsley-Davenport, who indeed had been the first female to ever win a World Cup skeleton event for the United States, “but there were women who had been competing long before I had – top Canadians, top Germans, Swiss, Norwegians. Those teams had very strong women who had much longer careers at that point.”
Since skeleton was in its infancy at the Olympics, Davenport said he actually thought from the very beginning that Parsley-Davenport would have as good a chance to medal as anybody.
“Skeleton is the kind of sport where you need to make decisions right away, and there’s only certain things that will train you to do that,” Davenport said. “You have to have the ability to think under pressure, and obviously the firefighting [experience] was extreme in that regard. You can’t freeze up when you need to make a decision.”
On the morning of the race, there was a blizzard, and many competitors thought it would get postponed.
Parsley-Davenport, though, said her (future) husband gave the team great advice.
“He said you can only control what you can control. Just stick with your game plan,” she said. “That was definitely a lesson on focusing on what you can control and forget about what you can’t. Having his voice of reason and encouragement and calm set the stage for us.”
The race went off as scheduled, and after the first heat, Parsley-Davenport had the second-fastest time behind her teammate, Tristan Gale-Geisler.
But while Parsley-Davenport felt good about her standing, she had no idea how much longer her hamstring could hold up. With the first few seconds of a race requiring competitors to run on the ice before jumping on their sled, a hamstring injury would rank near the top of one of the worst that a competitor could have.
Before the final heat, a team of trainers worked feverishly to keep her muscles warm and limber.
“I wasn’t 100%, but at that point you don’t care,” she said.
In the end, she won the silver medal, finishing roughly 1/10th of a second behind Gale-Geisler, who took the gold. (Jimmy Shea of the U.S. men’s team also won gold.)
“It felt amazing for a lot of reasons,” Parsley-Davenport said.
One was that her entire family, including her older brothers, Bob and Brian, and her sister, Aimee, were there to celebrate with her. Another was that the event had gone off without any hitches.
“It proved that we deserved to be there,” Parsley-Davenport said, “and we should be in the Games moving forward – and we still are.”
Following her Olympic career, Parsley-Davenport worked as a school nurse at an elementary school in her hometown. (Contributed photo)
***
After the Salt Lake Games, Parsley-Davenport won the 2004 national championship, and she was a favorite to medal at the 2006 Olympics in Turin. Unfortunately, during qualifying in Calgary, Parsley-Davenport was struck by a runaway bobsled while standing at the bottom of the track and injured her leg.
“It was not the way I wanted my career to end,” she said, “but just like the situation in handball, they asked me to come on as a coach. So I went to the 2006 Games as an assistant coach and really enjoyed the experience.
“It was disappointing because I had done really well on the Olympic track the year before. … It was my kind of track. … It was tough to walk along the track as a coach, but a good experience working with the athletes that year.”
Parsley-Davenport stayed close to the sport, serving as a broadcaster for NBC at the 2010 Olympics before dedicating herself to nursing, serving as nurse at an elementary school in Granville for 14 years.
These days, Parsley-Davenport, with her silver medal in tow, is a frequent guest speaker at schools. And she has recently begun working for a personal and professional coaching company called Valor Performance in Boston. “I’ve taken a lot of the lessons I’ve learned as an athlete and use them in executive, high-performance coaching,” she said.
Shortly after the Salt Lake City Games, Parsley-Davenport retired from firefighting after a 20-year career. Sadly, her brother Bob– who had been a firefighter for much of his life – died of cancer about five years later.
“He role-modeled [firefighting] first,” she said. “He took his first-child, oldest-sibling responsibilities very seriously, and was always watching out for us. I think that kind of set the tone for the relationships we all had together.”
Parsley-Davenport said firefighting will always be at her core.
“It built up who we were and how we served,” Parsley-Davenport said. “I think a big part of who you are is, ‘How are you giving back?’
“And so it felt good to have firefighting as our way of doing that.”
