When Zhao Dan stepped into the National Sliding Center in Yanqing for her first ever Olympic final, there were no doubts about her racing quality, the maturity she exuded or the history she was making. 

But it remained to be seen how she would cope with a moment at the Beijing Winter Games that was like nothing she had experienced before.

She did so with the poise and assurance of a future star. As the youngest slider in the event, the 19-year-old negotiated the 1,615-meter track with a combined time of 4:097.52 across four runs to finish an impressive ninth in the women's skeleton on Saturday night.

In a sport overwhelmingly dominated by seasoned veterans, Zhao, who was one of the flag bearers for Team China at the opening ceremony, is an admirable outlier. But her stunning progress in recent years reflects how far Team China have come in women's skeleton in a short period of time.

In 2019, Zhao recorded three wins and two runners-up finishes in six races at the IBSF (International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation) Youth Series Competition. In 2020, she finished seventh at the Lausanne Winter Youth Olympics. Last year, she made her presence felt in Innsbruck, Austria by winning a gold in the Intercontinental Cup, a second-tier circuit of IBSF series.

Zhao carried that momentum into the Winter Olympics. Earlier this week, she finished in the top-three in three of six training runs. And at the halfway mark of the race on Friday, she sat in fourth, not far behind overnight leader Jaclyn Narracott of Australia. But in Saturday's final rounds, Zhao had a skid in her third run and dragged her toes at the turn of a corner, thus missing the chance to reach the Olympic podium.

However, it was still a remarkable debut for Zhao, who had not even touched a bobsled four years ago when the world's finest sliders were slugging it out at the last Olympics in PyeongChang. Like her compatriot Yan Wengang, who clinched a historic bronze medal for China in the men's skeleton on Friday, Zhao was a former long jumper who only started skeleton racing in 2018.

Though Zhao failed to replicate Yan's sensational success in the men's event, the soft-spoken girl from north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region knew that she was still in the early stages of her career and said she was proud of her performance at her first Olympics.

"I have no regrets. Every part of this journey is a chapter I wrote myself," she beamed. "I'll treasure this and look forward to the future."

"Skids will happen even if you're one of the top in the world," she observed. "Knowing the track well is no guarantee for a smooth run. It depends a lot on the ice, on your sled, on how you drive. At corner 4, I didn't manage to make adjustments in time and that affected the rest of my run."

While Zhao will leave Beijing 2022 without a medal around her neck, she remains in high spirits and hopes she can inspire more people to pick up skeleton in their spare time.

"I think after such a long time training and preparing for this, Li Yuxi (Zhao's teammate) and I would really like the world and more in China to know about skeleton and come join us," she said. "Skeleton might look dangerous, but it's actually very fun and thrilling. I hope those risk takers come to join us."

(Reporting from the Yanqing competition zone)