The bobsled—or bobsleigh, as its name appears on the official Pyeongchang Games agenda—requires participants to pack themselves as tightly as possible into a carbon-fiber torpedo and then hurtle down an ice chute at speeds approaching triple digits, all while doing everything in their power to reach the bottom a few fractions of a second before the next twosome or foursome. It is one of those Olympic events that invariably causes viewers to conclude with grim certainty that the participants zooming across their screens might perish at any moment. “How the hell,” you might reasonably wonder after you remember to breathe again, “does anyone ever get into bobsled?”
Given this country’s dearth of municipal bobsled leagues, it’s a fair question. But participation in the sport—and even going to the Olympics to compete in it—is not limited to the handful of kids who grow up near Park City, Utah or Lake Placid, New York, the only two towns in the country whose history of hosting the Winter Games means that they have a local bobsled, luge, and skeleton track available for recreational use. It turns out that your best chance at making a future Olympic squad is knowing your way around a pair of track spikes.
At the start of every four-man bobsled run, the team’s task is to propel their 463-pound chariot from zero to a speed that exceeds zero by as much as they can manage. The first 50 meters—and really, it’s closer to 30, since humans can’t run fast enough to keep up beyond that point—is basically the only stretch when the sled is actually accelerating. After that, as three-time Olympian Nick Cunningham told me, everything they do is designed to ensure that the team loses as little of that hard-earned momentum as possible. Other than a willingness to wear an impossibly-tight full-body jumpsuit for extended periods of time, bobsled prioritizes speed and power above everything else.
The talent pools from which officials recruit are exactly the ones you’d expect. Of the 14 members of the men’s national team, 12 of them were college track athletes, college football players, or—in some cases—both. (One of the two who has no such experience hails from upstate New York and began piloting bobsleds as a child. The other is an active-duty Green Beret, which is not, if my memory of The Rock’s character in Walking Tall serves, a job often available to unathletic people.) Everyone on the women’s team boasts collegiate track and field experience save for Elana Meyers Taylor, who played college softball and has competed with the U.S. women’s rugby team, and Lauren Gibbs, who was recruited to Brown to run track, but opted to play volleyball instead.
Adopting a sort of lowest-hanging-fruit approach, Olympic bobsledders are sometimes plucked directly from the ranks of Summer Games stars. Two years after competing in London in 2012, sprinter Lauryn Williams and hurdler Lolo Jones claimed silver medals in Sochi, this time as newly-minted sleigh-pushers. “You’d be hard-pressed to find too many of us who didn’t pick up the sport later in life,” says four-time Ivy League decathlon champion Evan Weinstock. Ever wonder why countries—like, say, Jamaica—with world-class short-track athletes but a notable dearth of native snow can still assemble successful bobsled teams? They have the perfect people for the job already.
The de facto prerequisite of a lengthy career in something else is kind of a running joke among bobsledders, especially since many of their fellow Olympians have been practicing their respective sports since the day they could walk. When I talked to Sam McGuffie, who you may remember as the star of the most captivating YouTube clip in college football recruiting history, the former Michigan and Rice standout couldn’t remember off the top of his head if his teammate Steve Langton was a late-career convert, too. “Langton, did you do track in college?” I overheard McGuffie ask. “Yeah,” he responded. “Of course.”
The first stop for aspiring novices is an NFL-esque combine, and everyone who has survived the experience has the same story of how they heard about it. “It’s a word-of-mouth situation,” says Carlo Valdes, whose track coach at UCLA urged him to try out after graduation. For Sam Michener, it was a college sports psychologist who had been a member of Trinidad and Tobago’s bobsled team. During Weinstock’s freshman year at Brown, one of his track teammates brought up the sport, mostly as a joke. Chris Kinney got serious about it thanks to an impromptu chat with Jones, a fellow hurdler. Shortly thereafter, while training for a meet in Florida, he drove several hours north to a combine in South Carolina and gave it a shot.
For sprinters and leapers and throwers and running backs, the components of a bobsled combine look awfully familiar. “It was like we’d been training our whole lives for bobsled,” says Michener, remembering his reaction upon arrival. “We just didn’t know we were training for this yet.” Teenage gym rats and middle-aged CrossFit enthusiasts alike run a 45-meter sprint—just a bit shy of the length of the start zone—with splits recorded at 15-meter intervals. Participants also perform a standing broad jump, and toss a 16-pound shot with two hands. (A medicine ball, the USABS is careful to note, is not an acceptable substitute.)
Top scorers are invited back to USA Bobsled & Skeleton rookie camp in Lake Placid, where they are tested on the squat and power clean. After that, they find out for the first time how well they perform in ice spikes, tackling a real-life sled alongside other hopefuls in a specially-designed “push house.” (These separate areas of a bobsled track allow teams to tinker with and rehearse their starts, since having to go all the way down after every single attempt would be wildly inefficient.)
The moment of truth, when it finally arrives, goes better for some than for others. “You always get some people who do really well in combine, but just can’t push a bobsled,” says Carlo Valdes. “It’s weird, but it happens.” The late Steve Holcomb, who won gold for the United States in Vancouver, fondly referred to the “X-factor” when talking about those individuals for whom the sport just clicks.“There are lots of guys who are bigger or faster or stronger than me, but I can push the sled better,” says Michener. “It doesn’t quite make sense.”
X-factor (and, um, character issues) aside, several members of the men’s team cited to 2012-era Adrian Peterson as the athlete whose hypothetical presence at a combine would make them the most nervous about their job security. At the 1992 Games in Albertville, former Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker competed in the two-man bobsled in the middle of his NFL career, a story that would break Skip Bayless’ brain on live TV were it to happen today. Neither combine potential nor historical accolades guarantee success, however, or even a national team berth—Tyson Gay, the American record-holder in the hundred-meter dash, failed to qualify for rookie camp when he tried out in 2016.
Everyone who signs up for a combine submits what USABS calls an “athletic résumé,” but otherwise, there are no formal qualifications for going through the process. And while learning how to push a sled from a dead stop takes time, says Weinstock, the running mechanics he developed on the track translated surprisingly well to the ice. In other words, if you feel good about your time off the blocks and are comfortable with your Olympic lifts, perusing the 2018 combine calendar could be your first step towards making an honest-to-God Olympic team, too.
Admittedly, after those first 50 meters, those finely-tuned track instincts become about as useful as a spare overcoat. Inside the sled, teammates are tasked with making their bodies part of the vehicle, keeping to a minimum the fidgeting and jostling that interfere with a smooth descent. It’s akin to subway surfing, if the subway were speeding through an edgeless frozen tunnel at 90 miles per hour, g forces pummeling hapless passengers at every curve. “The two-guy’s helmet has to be two centimeters off the driver,” says Kinney. “My helmet is digging into the two-guy’s back, and I have to be lower than him, and the four-guy has to be lower than me.” Another relevant detail: They do all of this stuff blind. Once that first frenetic sprint is over, the pilot is the only one with eyes on what comes next.
Like a team of spandex-clad Daredevils, even though the push crew can’t see anything, they perceive everything. Bobsledders have to memorize each course, poring over maps and walking the track together and devouring point-of-view YouTube clips before ever attempting a live run. “We know what every meter of every track in the world feels like,” says Michener.
Getting lost, even temporarily, can have profound consequences for everyone. As a brakeman, Michener is responsible for helping to slow the sled down, a process that can take a football field or more to complete. This means he has to know exactly where the finish line is without being able to see it. “After the 16th turn, I know that I have about 1.5 seconds,” he says. “So when we come out of it, I count that off in my head and then hit the brakes. If I pull after corner 15, the ruin is ruined. If I think there’s one more corner after 16? We’re flying off the end of the track.”
Any extraneous movement can cause the driver to skid, especially during straightaways, and the consequences of wiping out are somehow even worse than one might expect. “It doesn’t matter where you are on the course,” Cunningham warns. “If you crash, you’re going all the way to the bottom, whether you like it or not.” In the event that the the team doesn’t nail their positioning out the gate, everyone has to wait patiently until the first curve to adjust—when the downward pressure affords them a few seconds of literal wiggle room—before locking all the way in.
This can be a difficult temptation to resist. “If Chris [Kinney] sits too early, or doesn’t sit down fast enough, and he’s on top my leg while we’re pulling 5 g of force?” asks Michener with a unsettling degree of nonchalance. “He could break it.” Bobsledders can’t communicate with each other during the run, either—at least, not in any meaningful sense. While drivers and passengers might unleash the occasional unintelligible, adrenaline-fueled pump-up scream at one another, the inside of this giant snow sarcophagus is too loud and too intense to allow for anything else.
Everyone gets beat to hell during those fifty-odd seconds—it’s just a question of which protrusion is hitting whose body, and where, and how frequently, and how hard. “My first time down,” remembers Weinstock reverentially, “I didn’t realize how violent it would be.” Michener likened it to a car accident, while Valdes compared it to simulating a football game. Williams, the 2012 silver medalist, memorably called each run “like being inside a washing machine rolling down the side of a mountain.” Cunningham eventually settled on a “very intense” roller coaster, but one stripped of padding and seatbelts. Ever the master of analogies, he invoked those grainy security clips of bus accidents, too. “When you hit a bump, everyone in the front pops up a little, right? But everyone at the back gets thrown into the roof.”
This is true of many Olympic events, but especially given the sport’s relative obscurity—again, sadly, recreational bobsledding leagues have yet to catch on in these United States—it’s hard to convey the experience of being inside a sleigh to viewers at home. “The speed, how loud it is, the vibrations, the pressure,” says Cunningham. “TV doesn’t do it justice.” If you see semi-frozen bobsledders staggering drunkenly from the ice after a run, bodies doubled over with hands on their knees, it’s probably because they haven’t quite regained the ability to hear or think or breathe just yet. Good luck parlaying track experience into dealing with that.
