With all eyes on the 2022 Winter Olympics and the best bets at many of the athletes’ journeys to the slopes and rinks of the world’s biggest winter sporting spectacle are as inspiring as the games themselves. And none more so than the Jamaican bobsled team immortalized in the 1994 movie, Cool Runnings.
With Jamaica fielding another Olympic bobsled team this year, the achievements of the original four are so much more than just a film. We rediscover how Jamaica began its own Winter Olympics journey.
From Calgary to Hollywood
Despite its box office success, Cool Runnings is only loosely based on the adventures of Jamaica’s first-ever bobsled team as they competed in the 1988 Calgary Olympics. And while the Hollywood film captured the imagination of millions, the true story of how four Jamaicans swapped the Caribbean for the icy slopes of Calgary is much more remarkable than the fiction.
As a founding team member, Devon Harris told Betway that putting together a Jamaican team to take on the best bobsled teams in the world “was the most ridiculous idea ever conceived by a man!”
But they did. And here’s how.
It started with a pushcart
1987 and two Americans – George Fitch and William Maloney – who were living in Jamaica decided to put together a bobsled team, inspired by the Jamaicans love of the Pushcart Derby.
An adrenalin sport where competitors hurl themselves down the side of a mountain in a cart, Fitch and Maloney made the comparison to bobsledding and set about creating a Jamaican bobsled team. The prize they had their eye on was the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
Fitch and Maloney narrowed their search down for team members who could run, an essential part of the bobsled. Harris, who was in the army at the time, was one of the Jamaican athletes to be selected.
Training in Lake Placid
The team approach, says Harris, was not whether they were going to the Olympics but how they would do it. Bobsled training on a tropical island was not going to work, so the team travelled to Lake Placid, New York, in September 1987, where they were introduced to a bobsled and track.
One month later, the Jamaican team went down a bobsled track for the first time – just four months before the actual Calgary Winter Olympics. After a six-week training programme, they returned home for Christmas. A final month at Lake Placid and they were off to the Winter Olympics. That’s five months from absolute beginners to Olympic bobsled competitors.
Crash landing
The inexperienced Jamaican team had to overcome huge physical and mental hurdles to even make it to Calgary. “The most difficult part of bobsledding in my mind was believing that you could,” explained Harris.
It was a crash on their fourth run that put paid to their Olympic ambitions, and the intrepid Jamaican team was disqualified from the 1988 Winter Games. They finished in style, walking together over the finish line carrying their sled to the end.
With the Jamaicans fielding another bobsled team in this year’s Winter Olympics, it seems the hopes and dreams of the original four are not yet over.