Bree Walker will be looking to make history in Cortina this evening.
Only one slider has ever won a medal for Australia at a Winter Olympic Games, the extraordinary bolt from the blue that was Jaclyn Narracott's skeleton silver in 2022.
Tonight, Walker will look to join her.
The only thing standing between the 33-year-old Victorian and her dreams is four runs of the fearsome 1,730 metres of twisting ice of the legendary Pista Olimpica Eugenio Monti.
Originally opened in 1923, the track was regularly used for world championships — nine times in fact — and was used for the 1956 Games.
However, it fell into a state of disrepair after its last competitive runs in 2008 and was closed shortly thereafter.
It has since been reopened after a controversial rebuild and hosted the opening leg of this year's IBSF World Cup at the end of November.
Germany utterly dominated, claiming gold in every event except the men's skeleton, which was won by Briton Matt Weston, and the mixed skeleton team, which was also won by Great Britain.
But Walker had a good performance, finishing third in the women's monobob just 0.16 seconds behind winner Laura Nolte and 0.01 seconds behind second-placed American Kaysha Love.
The track earned rave reviews from Walker.
"It's seriously so beautiful," she said.
"It's quickly becoming one of my favourite places on tour."
The track has a history mired in both glory and tragedy.
Reto Capadrutt of Switzerland died on the course in 1939, while West German bobsledder Toni Pensperger was killed during the 1966 World Championships. American James Morgan was another casualty of the track in 1981, as was Paolo Rigon, a young stuntman working on the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, which was filmed in Cortina.
But for Italian sledding, the venue retains a romantic quality, honed by a legacy of success it achieved in the 1956 Games and world championships thereafter.
The New York plan B
In a different world, Walker would not be lining up in Cortina for her shot at gold — she and the rest of the sliding athletes would be across the Atlantic in Lake Placid, some 6,400km west of where the rest of the Games would take place.
Costs to renovate the Cortina bobsled track were seen as prohibitively expensive, and, due to authorities dragging their feet on making a decision, it was deemed to be too hard to rebuild a suitable track in time.
Alternatives were sought, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) proposing use of the tracks in St Moritz or Igls in near neighbours Switzerland or Austria, respectively, as options, before Lake Placid was assigned as a plan B venue in December 2024.
This would have put the Milano Cortina Games — already the most geographically dispersed Winter Games in history — on par with Melbourne in 1956 and Paris 2024 as having an event in a different country.
Equestrian events at the 1958 Games took place in Stockholm due to Australia's strict bio-importation rules, while surfing at the Paris 2024 Games took place in Tahiti.
Had New York State been called upon to host, it would have had an unusual parallel with the last time the Games were held in Cortina d'Ampezzo in 1956.
The subsequent 1960 Games in Squaw Valley — the resort now known as Palisades Tahoe near Lake Tahoe — did not have a bobsled competition at all due to the prohibitive cost of building a track in the remote Californian valley.
The Olympic track in Cortina hosted a world championship that year instead.
Fortunately for local organisers, a solution was found and the Cortina track has been rebuilt, allowing us to explore the extraordinary legacy of the man for whom it is named.
"If we're going to host the Olympics, we're hosting them in Italy," La Federazione Italiana Sport Invernali (FISI) president Flavio Roda told AP in 2021.
"The bobsled track is one of the few legacies that we can leave behind."
So, in February 2024, building the new track in Cortina started and, just 13 months later, it was tested for the first time.
"It's really been quite an adventure," Infrastructure and Transport Minister Matteo Salvini said last year.
"I want to thank the construction firm, which was the first one to believe in this, and the journalists who motivated us," he added, in relation to articles claiming that the project would never be done.
It is done, against the odds, as once again the name of Eugenio Monti will feature at an Olympic Games.
Monti's selfless sporting heroism
Monti is one of Italy's greatest Olympians, winning six medals in two and four-man bobsleigh events across three Games.
Starting as a skier of some repute, he won three national alpine skiing titles between 1949 and 1950 in the slalom (twice) and giant slalom, before injuring his knees in a fall in 1951.
Still prepossessed by a desire for speed, Monti — known as il Rosso Volante, or the Flying Redhead — got into bobsled racing.
It was a match made in heaven.
A nine-time world champion, Monti won two Olympic silver medals on his home track in 1956 and then claimed two gold medals at the world championship in 1960 at the same venue in the absence of an Olympic competition that year.
The two silvers Monti won, as well as the gold earned by the other Italian two-man sled driven by Lamberto Dalla Costa, were the only three medals Italy won at the 1956 Games.
Monti won two more medals, both bronze, on the return of Olympic competition in 1964 before becoming the first man in history to win gold in both the two and four-man bob events at the 1968 Games in Grenoble when he was 40 years old.
That double gold was a fitting reward for the Italian, after his selflessness at the 1964 Games in Innsbruck.
During the four-man competition, following a stunning first run in which they had taken the lead, the Canadian team realised it had broken the axle on its sled and faced having to withdraw.
Unwilling to claim a victory as a result of another team's misfortune, however, Monti and the Italian mechanics worked to replace the damaged axle, allowing the Canadians to continue to compete and claim gold ahead of Austria and Italy.
Then, in the two-man event, something similar happened.
Leading after the first round of competition, Great Britain's sled was damaged due to a bolt having sheared off.
Monti, realising the issue, told the Brits that if they could get someone to the bottom of the run with a spanner, they could take the bolt off his sled and use it on theirs.
The British team accepted that act of generosity and went on to win gold.
"[British driver Tony] Nash didn't win because I gave him the bolt," Monti said amidst criticism from the Italian press.
"He won because he had the fastest run."
Such sporting selflessness is rare and as such, the International Fair Play Committee rewarded his sportsmanship with its highest possible honour, the Pierre de Coubertin Fair Play Trophy, the first time it had ever been awarded.
That spirit of sportsmanship lives on in the sport, with Australian Sarah Blizzard exhibiting the same heartwarming selflessness in the lead-up to these Games by lending her sled to the Dutch two-man team of Dave Wesselink and Jelen Franjic.
The Dutch will use Blizzard's sled in Cortina on the track that bears Monti's name, which will be lit up in Olympic lights once more.
