Jamaican bobsleigh team

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The Jamaican bobsleigh team took part in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary for the first time . Smiled at by many winter sports nations, the Jamaicans nevertheless managed to qualify for participation in the Olympic bobsleigh competitions .

founding

Devon Harris , one of the members of the team in 1988, later said of the formation of the team: “The idea for this team came from two Americans, George Fitch and William Maloney, who were in Jamaica on business and saw a soapbox race . They said it looked like a bobsleigh race that was out of ice. Since the start of the race is such an important part, and there are many sprinters in Jamaica , they thought of recruiting some athletes for the Summer Games, but they were not enthusiastic about the idea. So they came to the military and looked for the team there. "

The first team consisted of:

The team was coached by Howard Siler . In preparation for the 1988 Winter Olympics , Frederick Powell and Caswell Allen also joined the team. However, everyone who, instead of Clayton and the other three founding members, had been nominated for the Olympics was enjoying the nightlife more than concentrating on the competition. For this reason, Allen was excluded from the team and replaced by Chris Stokes . Chris Stokes, the brother of Dudley Stokes , was a very good sprinter, but he had never sat in a bobsleigh before.

Olympic games

The team had to contend with many accidents and technical difficulties in the 1988 Olympic year, but in Albertville 1992 they improved significantly. They made it to 14th place in the four-man bobsleigh, leaving teams from the USA, France and Russia behind. The two-man bobsleigh team even reached 10th place. The team continued to improve and won some medals at youth events . Among other things, it won gold at the Push World Championships in Monte Carlo in 2000 , where it was all about pushing times.

At the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 , the team consisted of Mark Hill, Lascelles Brown , Garnett Jones, Stewart Maxwell, Clive McDonald, Wayne Thomas, Dudley Stokes and Captain Winston Watts . In the two-man bobsleigh, there was only a disappointing 28th place in the end, but Watts and Brown managed to set a start record. The women's team consisted of Porscha Morgan, Winsome Cole, Taniesha LcLean and Dukelyn Barrett. The Jamaican bobsleigh team trains in Evanston , Wyoming . Their motto is "The Hottest Thing on Ice" .

The Jamaican two-man bobsleigh at the 2014 Olympic Winter Games

Jamaica participated in all of the Winter Olympics from 1988 to 2002. At the 2006 Turin Games , the Jamaican team did not start. Lascelles Brown, the pusher from the 2002 team, won silver for Canada in the two-man bobsleigh with Pierre Lueders . The 2010 Vancouver Winter Games also took place without a Jamaican bobsleigh team, but the island was represented in a ski discipline for the first time by Errol Kerr .

At the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi , Russia , a bobsleigh team for Jamaica started again for the first time after a twelve-year break: the now 46-year-old driver Winston Watts and his pusher Marvin Dixon were able to compete, although only in 39th place in the world rankings, Secure one of 30 starting places for the two-man bobsleigh competition via a move-up procedure. In the Olympic competition, the Jamaican two-man bobsleigh took 29th place; He left behind him the bobsleigh from Serbia, which had been directly in front of Jamaica in the first two races, but did not start for the third run.

In 2018 , a women's team took part in the two-man bobsleigh in the Winter Olympics for the first time. The duo, consisting of Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian as a pilot and the former athletics world champion Carrie Russell as a pusher, took 18th place in the competition, leaving behind the bobsleigh from Nigeria, who participated for the first time . The team made headlines when former Olympic bobsleigh champion Sandra Kiriasis , who was initially part of the Jamaican coaching team, was dismissed at short notice before the Olympic race and then tried unsuccessfully to ban Jamaica's bobsleigh.

Filmography

Disney produced a hit film about the 1988 Olympics, Cool Runnings , that features a fictional story about the first Jamaican bobsleigh team to compete in the Olympics.

Others

At the 2004 Wok World Championships in Innsbruck , the team took part in the four-wok and finished fourth, and in 2014 they won the gold medal in the four-wok at the Wok World Championships in Berchtesgaden.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Legacy. Retrieved April 8, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Jamaica's bobsleigh qualified for the Olympics: Cool Runnings 2.0. Spiegel Online, January 21, 2014, accessed February 26, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Peter Ahrens: Mud battle in the ice channel. Spiegel Online, February 19, 2018, accessed February 24, 2018 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Jamaica initially finished the Olympic competition in 19th place; a bobsleigh of the Olympic Athletes from Russia was later disqualified, so that the Jamaicans moved up one place.

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