By John Wimperis, Local Democracy Reporter: When Britain sends its bobsleigh team to the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, it is the South West that will have helped them get there.
Through the summer, the GB bobsleigh team practices bobsleigh in Bath. When the team lost its funding after the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, it was an Exeter-based internet provider which stepped in to sponsor them.
Bath may not have the icy mountains needed for a bobsleigh track — despite how Bathwick Hill feels in the colder months — but at the top of the hill, at the University of Bath, is the UK’s only push start track. Tucked away behind some trees at the edge of the campus, you would not expect to find the track if you did not know it was there — and you definitely would not know what it was.
A small hut perches at the top of a ramp, where there are rails instead of ice. The ramp sweeps down and then back up again, supported by girders, until it almost breaches the tree line. Here — in a bobsleigh with wheels rather than runners — is where Britain’s bobsleigh athletes train.
And last Tuesday, I joined the GB men’s bobsleigh team and their sponsors South West-based internet provider Cuckoo and All Points Fibre to give it a go.
My attempt on the track is a bit less seamless than what I had seen on television, despite instruction from GB bobsledders Adam Baird and Luka Williams at the top of the track. Determined to make a good time, I push the bobsleigh at such a pace that I’m then hard pressed to make the jump into it. I manage to bash my foot as I clamber in the bobsleigh while it shoots down the slope.
On a full bobsleigh track, I would be flying downhill around icy twists and turns but here, the track is only designed to allow the team to practise the push start.
When the track was built in 2000, a bungee cord would pull the bobsleigh back and prevent it shooting off the end. But in 2015, a ramp was built to slow the bobsleigh down and send it rolling backwards, where the rest of the four-man GB bobsleigh team, Austin Milward and Somerset man Jens Hullah gave me a push back to the top.
Jens first got into winter sports while at Churchill Secondary School in North Somerset, learning to ski at Mendip Activity Centre’s dry ski slope and joining a school ski trip to Austria. Now he is a vital part of the bobsleigh team, helping generate the speed of the bobsleigh in the push start before having to get into the bobsleigh at speed.
“That’s what the athletic ability is at the end of the day: the push start,” said Adam, “the driving comes from being on ice.”
Adam is the team’s driver — the man at the front of the bobsleigh responsible for getting it down the winding track. He told me: “As a driver, you also need to be able to flip that switch to be able to push a sled aggressively and fast but then straight away, as soon as I jump in the sled, I have to turn that off and turn into cool calm collected Adam mode.
“Because if you try to drive the bobsleigh angry or fired up you will either crash or create mistakes that don’t need to be created.”
With no full bobsleigh tracks in the UK, there is nowhere for Adam or the rest of the team to practise navigating a full track without going abroad. But he says this has not held them back.
“We are no better off or worse off in regards to ice time on a track because it’s seasonal,” he told me. “People can’t go skiing in the summer; they can’t go bobsleighing in the summer because the ice disappears in the hotter temperature.
“So we are lucky to have one of the best push track facilities in the world here at Bath University. And really that is all you can train for in the summer.”
As the British weather makes it increasingly clear that summer is over, the team are off to Germany and Norway to train throughout the winter. They have just two seasons left to train before the Winter Olympics in 2026.
Adam, a serving marine, was “poached” from the navy’s rugby league team for bobsleigh and went full time for the 2020 season. He said: “Being a high level sportsman is exactly the same as being in the military. It’s a team sport environment. There is no single man in this sport or in the military. So therefore team cohesion has to be on point coming into team high level sport.”
He added: “You have to gel. It’s not forced but you naturally become good friends and by that happening you naturally breed success.”
But the sport has long faced well-documented funding struggles. Shortly before Adam joined the team, bobsleigh lost all their funding from UK Sport after the 2018 games, for what he said were various reasons.
He said: “It’s hard to walk into this sport with funding because you have to have results to then win your funding.”
But support came from an unlikely source. Just before Adam joined the team, a South West-based fibre internet provider stepped in to sponsor the team. Cuckoo are based in Exeter and recently went from being a regional fibre provider to one available to 17m homes across the UK.
They deliver super fast internet to people’s homes, and are now hoping to send a super fast GB bobsleigh team to the Winter Olympics. Paul Hellings, Cuckoo CEO said: “We have got a history of sponsoring local teams, particularly around the Somerset, Devon area.”
Now Cuckoo have signed a new sponsorship deal with British Bobsleigh deal with Bristish Bobsleigh to continue their support. Comparing the company’s ethos to the team’s, he said: “Everything we do is about being the fastest but also the fairest.”
Adam said: “I came in in 2020 so I didn’t know about funding. I was always under this sponsorship bracket and we have built ourselves up from there and we have come on massively in the last couple of years.”
He added: “This season, we have everything on paper now. We have the athletes, we have the equipment, we have everything we would need to be successful. I would like to see top ten finishes, and top starts this season. And potentially we could be hitting top six at the Olympic Games, maybe even better.
“That is the ambition.”
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