Corporate Speakers - Speaker and Olympian Lee Ann Parsley booking information

An inspirational speach from Olympic Silver Medalist Lee Ann Parsley can be available for your next event.

Whether she's running into a burning house or whizzing down an icy slope at close to 80 mph, Lee Ann Parsley never worries.

She doesn't have the time.

Parsley is a firefighter who was also on the U.S. Olympic skeleton team, competing in a sport that is returning to the Winter Games for the first time since 1948. Through grit and determination, she won a Silver Medal.

She puts on a helmet and skintight bodysuit and hurls herself down the ice headfirst and on her belly, riding a sled that looks something like a big lunch tray. The brakes? Nothing but the spikes on her shoes.

"I think I've been clocked at 80 mph," Parsley said. "The speed at times can be the kind of exhilarating scary where you want to go fast. That's kind of the point of it. In the straights, when you start to pick up speed, it can really take your breath away."

lee ann parsley booking agent If gravity doesn't take it away first.

"It's almost like it flattens you out," Parsley said of the G-forces. "It's more like having an elephant sitting on top of you. It's pushing the air out of you and pushing your head down. ... My face shield scrapes the ice on the curves."

Parsley earned a spot on the Olympic team by finishing second in the Skeleton World Cup in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

Reaching the Salt Lake City Games was another in a long list of accomplishments for the 33-year-old resident of Granville, in central Ohio.

Parsley, who quickly rose to the top of the skeleton rankings after taking up the sport in 1998, has competed nationally in team handball, too.

She also works as a nurse in Columbus, has fought wildfires nationwide and was the Ohio State Firefighters Association's firefighter of the year in 1999.

"I don't think she has a lot of inhibitions. She doesn't have fears of new and unusual things," said Dudley Wright, chief of the fire department in Granville, where Parsley volunteers. "When you look at everything she has experienced in her life, it's pretty remarkable."

It's also heroic.

Parsley was decorated for her work on Feb. 15, 1999, when she helped rescue a woman and her 14-year-old daughter from their burning mobile home in Licking County, east of Columbus. The girl needed extra attention because she uses a wheelchair.

Parsley sat at a window and had other firefighters place the woman and her daughter on her lap one at a time. They then tumbled backward out of the window "like a scuba diver out the back of the boat," she said.

"She's willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done," said Wright, who was inside the mobile home that day. "She is always the dirtiest one to come out of a fire. She is going to be covered in soot."

Parsley doesn't like to take credit for her actions.

"With both my firefighting and with skeleton you spend so much of your time training and practicing things they become second nature," she said. "Doing that, you eliminate some of the risk."

lee ann parsley In sports, few things are as risky as skeleton.

Parsley got started after doing some Internet research on women's sports. She was more interested in bobsled, but - at 5-foot-8 and 145 pounds - she wasn't big enough.

So Parsley, always eager for adventure, enrolled in skeleton school in Park City, Utah.

"Right off the bat I got into it and really enjoyed it," she said.

Parsley steers her sled by shifting her body weight, and she has to memorize when to make each movement because she's not strong enough to hold her head up.

"A lot of the track comes to me blind," she said. "When your head is on the ice and it's rattling around, you learn the track a bit differently by backing off and watching other people go through."

Parsley knows a serious injury is just one wrong move away, but she isn't too concerned.

"In skeleton, I know what the curve is doing, but with firefighting, it's just full of unknowns," she said. "You don't know what's burning until you get there."

Parsley's family can't help but worry.

"There is a certain amount of apprehension on my part, but I know before she does things she tries to learn everything she can about it," said her mother, Ruth Ann. "I don't know where she got this adventurous streak. It's not from me."

Parsley's older brothers, Brian and Bob, used to be volunteer firefighters in Granville.

Hanging out at the firehouse as a teen-ager, Parsley became interested in doing the job herself. Besides volunteering in Granville, she's on the staff at the Plain Township Fire Department in New Albany.

"I turned 16 and said, 'What the heck. I hang out here all the time, anyway, I might as well join,"' Parsley said. "And I've been at it ever since."

Fighting fires has taken her to Oregon, California, Montana, Idaho and Florida as part of the Ohio Interagency Wildfire Crew. Skeleton competitions have been held in Germany and Switzerland; training is in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Park City.

Tired of "living out of hotels and eating out every meal," Parsley is ready to return to central Ohio and finish her doctorate in community health nursing at Ohio State.

"I've got a lot of stuff to finish," she said, "before I think about any more sliding." .

Olympian Lee Ann Parsley is available to speak at your next event or conference. Contact us today to get started.