Used sleds, crumbling venues, crushing costs, Canada’s path back to bobsled success is an uphill climb

The braintrust at Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton chose a frigid Friday morning in late January to visit Olympic Heights Elementary School in Calgary with a select group of athletes for the official Milano-Cortina squad unveiling, and midway through the 50-minute presentation, the grade-schoolers remain riveted.

When principal Trevor Barkley asks for silence, they sit cross-legged on the gym floor and oblige him. No fidgeting, no horseplay, none of the stray chatter that could get a kid sent back to class. 

But the audience erupts each time a new team member emerges from the change rooms at the back of the gym and strolls to the front of the room to receive their black and red Team Canada jacket. 

The group comprises young veterans such as Dawn Richardson-Wilson, a world-class brakeman with serious footspeed. In 2023 she was an all-Canadian sprinter at the University of Calgary, and her 7.34-second 60-metre dash ranked fourth nationwide, just behind future Olympians Jaqueline Madogo and Audrey Leduc.

It also includes newcomer Luka Stoikos, a former standout football player at the University of Toronto who’s built like a Brinks truck but accelerates like a dragster. In 2022 he led OUA in kickoff return average (25.3 yds) and touchdowns (2) as a 240-pound fullback.

And it features Kelsey Mitchell, the gold-medal-winning sprint cyclist from the 2020 Summer Games who crossed over to bobsled and made the Olympic team in her first season on the circuit.

Each new Olympian receives the same cheer — sudden, joyous, and loud enough to drown out the arena rock blaring from a pair of speakers near the gym entrance. In pro wrestling, they call that kind of goosebump-raising ovation a “Pop.”

And much like a WWE pay-per-view event, this day’s team announcement is stage managed to maximize drama, but the outcome is pre-determined. By the time Cynthia Appiah, Canada’s top monobob and two-woman bobsled pilot this season, high-fives her way through a crowd of students en route to her mark at the front of the gym, Instagram posts unveiling the squad are already racking up likes and comments.

Those 14 bobsled athletes will line up in Cortina, Italy this week carrying another poorly concealed secret: Team Canada is rebuilding

Canadian bobsledders have won at least one medal in every Games since 2006, including two bronze in 2022. But heading into the Milano-Cortina Olympics, no Canadian team has finished higher than sixth in a World Cup event. The lone podium result was Appiah’s monobob silver in Winterburg, Germany in early January.

From their current position, athletes and decision-makers say they can see a path back to the top of the podium. They believe in the horsepower Canada’s brakemen provide at the top of the course, and in the current crop of pilots, a mix of veterans and developing drivers, to provide the fastest, smoothest ride possible. 

But this season Team Canada’s ambitions have run head-first into financial reality.

$25,000 per athlete

Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton (BCS) lost more than $1 million in funding before this season, and the resulting budget cuts have inflated the price of suiting up. This year team fees ballooned to $25,000 per athlete. And tight finances complicate the essential task of keeping pace with the sport’s ever-evolving technology.

The sleds Team Canada will use in Milano Cortina provide a stark illustration. They’re from 2018, hand-me-downs purchased from Team Germany, a dominant program whose deep pockets keep them on the cutting edge of bobsled engineering.

If the current cash crisis continues, it could hamstring the program’s long-term development. The sport’s upper echelon remains visible, but only through a thick glass ceiling.

“How do we get back to where we were as a sliding nation, hunting for medals, week in, week out?” asks Jesse Lumsden the two-time world championship medallist who is now BCS’s high-performance director. “At this point, we’re just below that. As a program, we’re going in to win medals. We don’t want to be going in just to participate. That’s not who we are as an organization.

Midway through the two-man bobsled competition at the 2022 Beijing Games, Reuters published a story with a headline that focused on the moment, but also has proven durable: Rivals face an uphill struggle against Germany’s talent, funds and tech.

That article arrived during an Olympic Games in which German sleds won five of six available men’s medals, along with gold and silver in the two-woman event, and the piece attributed much of that success to the staggering sums Germany’s federation invests in its teams. A roster of deep-pocketed sponsors like Adidas and Allianz kept the program flush with cash, while a partnership with the automaker BMW helped the program design and refine its sleds. When they become obsolete, team Germany often sells them to rivals, like Canada, then puts the profit back into the program.

The payoff continues to show up on the World Cup leaderboard. 

Across seven events in the current season, German sleds have won 18 of 21 podium placements in the four-man bobsled. In the two-man event that figure jumps to 20 of 21, with Great Britain, which claimed bronze in St. Moritz Jan. 10, the lone outlier. 

The two-woman event has slightly more representation at the top — athletes from three different countries have won medals this season. But German competitors still dominate, claiming 14 of 21 available podium places.

If you can imagine an Olympic marathoner lacing up a pair of old-school racing flats and trying to keep pace with runners in next-gen supershoes, then you can understand the challenge Canadians face when they wheel out their eight-year-old bobsleds to race Germans in newer, sleeker, faster models. In a sport where speed matters, German sleds can hit higher top velocities, gaining valuable fractions of seconds before even factoring a pilot’s skill.

And if you can’t relate to distance running, veteran brakeman Mike O’Higgins compares it to trying to win a mismatch at the drag strip.

“You can have a great driver in a Honda Civic,” he says. “And the person in the Porsche is going to have to make some pretty serious mistakes.”

By contrast, women’s monobob mandates that all competitors drive the same model of sled. In theory, the rule change eliminates the technological edge that accrues to big-spending programs like Germany, and places more emphasis on a pilot’s speed, power and skill. 

And in practice, the approach leads to diversity atop the podium. Five different countries are represented among this season’s medal winners, with Melissa Lotholtz of Barrhead, Alta. joining Appiah in the overall top 10. 

Those results also highlight Team Canada’s dilemma.

For the men’s program, showing that we have the top-ranked push, that we’re held back by our equipment and not our athleticism, that would be really helpful showing potential funding partners that they’re really important.– Canadian sledder Mike O’Higgins

Monobob standings hint that Canada’s pilots are as good as drivers from any other program, but to stay competitive in team events, using the oldest sleds on the tour, Canada’s drivers need to be even better. And if staying current on sled tech means spending money designing, buying, and refining vessels, Germany has that cash on hand and Canada doesn’t.

The upshot for many Canadian competitors is a revised set of goals heading into Milano Cortina, more focused on process than results. If Canada’s athletes can’t control Team Germany’s likely edge in top speed, but they have complete control at the top of the course, where the fastest start times belong to the teams with the best athletes, working in sync.

“For the men’s program, showing that we have the top-ranked push, that we’re held back by our equipment and not our athleticism, that would be really helpful showing potential funding partners that they’re really important,” O’Higgins says. “They’re the only thing standing between us and medals in 2030.”

For his part, Lumsden opts not to focus on the technology gap between Germany and Canada. Too much like conceding the race before you’ve even lined up. So he urges Canadian pilots to find ways to skim hundredths of a second lower down the course, reasoning that a smoother ride and the right line can compensate for a lack of raw speed.

“We can always strive to be better drivers, better students of the sport,” he said.

As a converted brakeman in his third season as a pilot, Jay Dearborn recognizes his late start as a driver hampers him, but says his fascination with the craft helps him gain ground on more experienced peers. He says half his brain is competitive like an athlete’s, and the other half is analytical like an engineer’s. In learning the secrets of each track, envisioning the perfect route through a curve, then hopping in the sled and putting it into practice, he says he’s bringing the two halves of his personality.

“There’s a lot of gut feeling physics,” says Dearborn, a former CFL defensive back from Yarker, Ont., a small town 30 minutes northwest of Kingston. “Your athletic self has to feel that and understand it, and get your hands to do what you need them to do.”

It’s not 15 years ago, where you could be a farmer and just drive a sled.– Shaquille Murray-Lawrence

Top-flight bobsled pilots are like elite NFL quarterbacks. Every team wants one, but they’re tough to find, acquire, or develop. 

Sometimes they come from other sports. Italy’s Simona di Silvestro drove race cars before crossing over to bobsled. 

Or they arrive from other programs. Kaillie Humphries, who won two Olympic gold medals for Canada, joined Team USA after a bitter split with the Canadian program in 2019, winning monobob gold as an American in Beijing four years ago.

Athletes also point out that as the sport evolves and talent pools deepen, and top-of-the track speed from your pilot changes from a bonus to a baseline requirement, converted brakemen become even more valuable. 

“It’s not 15 years ago, where you could be a farmer and just drive a sled,” says brakeman Shaquille Murray-Lawrence,  a Scarborough native whose 4.41-second 40-yard dash is the third-fastest electronically timed sprint in CFL combine history. “Now you’re going against nations where the driver is a world-class sprinter, and he’s got a world-class brakeman. You can’t beat these nations with four monsters when you’ve only got three and a bystander.”

For Appiah, the move to the front of the sled also meant defying conventions that typecast Black athletes as horsepower providers, and kept the more prestigious pilot’s position largely white. Her decision followed heart-to-heart talks with trailblazing African-Canadian brakemen Lascelles Brown, Neville Wright, and Shelly-Ann Brown, who won silver at the 2010 Games in Whistler, B.C.

“I would never have thought of it. They really spurred me on,” says Appiah. “I had lunch with Shelly-Ann and she said one of her biggest regrets was not becoming a pilot, and I didn’t want to be saddled with any regrets either.”

But two big obstacles stand between Team Canada and a deeper roster of elite pilots.

I’m essentially a small business owner. You’re grinding it out.”– Melissa Lotholz on the costs of sledding

The first one? Money. Driving a bobsled carries a long list of added costs.

On top of team team fees, pilots pay for the runners on which the sled rides, which cost roughly $12,000 a set, plus the cargo vans and ferries that transport sleds around Europe and during the World Cup season. Factor in miscellaneous costs like gym memberships, supplements and gas, and costs add up quickly. Lodholtz says it cost $70,000 to get her sled through this season.

“I’m essentially a small business owner,” says Lotholtz, a two-time world championship silver medallist. “You’re grinding it out.”

Another way to describe the financial burden on bobsled pilots: prohibitive.

Dearborn, the poster boy for Canada’s brakeman-to-pilot pipeline, depended heavily on local residents and hometown businesses to help finance his first Olympic season. And while he wants to compete in the 2030 Games, he isn’t sure he can afford another quadrennial.

“I needed to lean on the community for that financial support, and they came through,” said Dearborn, who will pilot two-man and four-man sleds in Cortina. “Long-term sustainability? I don’t know. These small businesses, I’m exceptionally grateful for their support. I don’t want to bang on their door every year for the next six years.”

The second problem?

Infrastructure, which means it’s also money.

The bobsled track at WinSport Canada Olympic Park in Calgary was built for the 1988 Winter Games at a cost of $18.8 million — roughly $46 million in today’s dollars. At the time it was a futuristic facility, and just the second full-length track on the continent, joining the one in Lake Placid, N.Y., used at the 1980 Winter Olympics.

But now the Calgary track is decommissioned and in disrepair, its refrigeration system outdated, its metal skeleton speckled with rust, and the outer surface of the concrete tube splintering like an old windshield. One fissure, easily visible from a nearby path, runs in a perfect vertical line, bisected by a jagged crack that veers to the left, like a country road splitting off from the main highway.

At its peak, between competition and training, the Calgary track saw 18,000 runs per year. Now, it’s dormant. 

The ice house in the massive multisport complex across the street is still in use, allowing athletes to hone their start line technique. But full-course training runs require transporting athletes and equipment to Whistler, B.C., to use the track constructed for the 2010 Games. 

The undertaking costs time and money, and Team Canada can’t spare much of either. Which means the current split-site setup also costs Canadian pilots valuable practice runs that could turn novice pilots into experts, and experts into medal contenders, with the technical expertise to reel in teams with faster sleds.

“We’re going to have pilots going down the hill at the Olympic games who have done fewer than 300 bobsled runs, which is 300 minutes of practice,” O’Higgins said. “That’s an insanely small amount of time to try to develop into a world-class athlete.”

O’Higgins, a seven-year veteran of the program, estimates that it takes at least three seasons under the current setup for a pilot to accumulate 300 practice runs. When the Calgary track was open, he says pilots could log that many training runs in a single year.

For optimists, Team Canada’s roster provides some reasons to believe this season’s pre-Olympic results are less rock bottom than a solid foundation.

Between RBC training ground, the nationwide series of talent identification camps, and BCS’s existing relationships with university football and track coaches, the program continues to bring in top-tier athletes.

Skylar Sieben was an all-conference heptathlete at the University of Arizona. She deferred an offer of a teaching job to pursue Olympic bobsled, and will line up as a brakeman in the two-woman event.

Keaton Brueggeling tried bobsled on the recommendation of a coach at the Ottawa-area facility where he trained for the CFL combine following his football career at Carleton University. Now he spends the summer and early fall with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, and the winter as a brakeman in the bobsled program.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Olympic Committee just announced a $500 million commitment from its corporate partners, aimed at propelling Canada to the top five in the total medal count at the Winter and Summer Olympics by 2035. That money could help loosen tight budgets for a variety of national sport organizations, BCS included.

“We believe Canada is a sporting nation at heart, and that sport matters to Canadians now more than ever,” COC CEO and secretary general David Shoemaker said in a statement announcing the Team Canada 2035 initiative. “This strategy cannot solve the immense funding gap that still exists in the sport system, but it does direct private dollars to areas where athletes will feel their impact the most.”

If bobsled success is a function of talent, technology and funding, Team Canada’s athletes are confident they’ve solved for the first variable. Beyond that, they’re still searching for solutions.

“We’ve got the bodies. They’re in the door, but we’ve got to keep them in the door,” Murray-Lawrence says. “The only way to keep them in the door is if the financial burden is lifted.”