Go Snow: Killian Fordeexperiences the exhilaration – and terror – of a bobsleigh ride
EIGHT YEARS AGO an Eton-educated Irish lord came within a fraction of a second of pulling off the shock of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics.
After the first of two runs, Lord Clifton Wrottesley in his skin-tight tricolour bodysuit was third in the men’s Skelton event. Unfortunately, his slower second run demoted him off the podium and into fourth place.
On Tuesday next, barring no further administrative hitches, Aoife Hoey and Claire Bergin will set off down the bobsleigh track on Blackcomb mountain trying to better the achievements of Clifton. They are Ireland’s only hope of a near medal finish and if they get it right on the day a top 10 finish is achievable.
Only one of a half dozen tracks open to the public, Lillehammer in Norway was where team driver Aoife first learned the sport and where I find myself being given a safety briefing on a very dim, sub-Arctic, mid-winter morning.
Most safety briefings are forgettable; the anticipation of doing something dangerous makes it impossible to recall what you were told. I’m working on the assumption that following the rules of “Don’t smoke, drink, stand up and wait until it stops” pretty much covers any perilous activity. I also think my helmet is too tight; well, that or the instructor is actually speaking Norwegian the whole time.
Briefing over, I climb into the sleigh. Our driver, a former Norwegian national champion, gives it a nudge and casually steps in.
The track itself is 1,700m long with 16 curves on it. The total vertical drop is little more than 100m and the steepest gradient is a mere 15 per cent – in short, it looks a bit tame.
The start line is followed by a short sharp dip to accelerate the bob into the first turn. We take the curve effortlessly and I am enjoying the ride, looking ahead at the turns coming up.
Turn two, the feeling is the same, the experience is a little like a rollercoaster only with no screaming crowds.
On about the third or fourth turn something happens – we seem to have picked up an incredible amount of speed and the sleigh flies into the curve; most alarming is the slingshot out of it. I find I can’t move my head and from relative silence there is the deafening noise of ice on steel.
What seemed like a polished ice surface now feels like the worst potholed road in pre-Celtic tiger Cavan.
Every tiny imperfection on the ice rattles its way through the runners and into my helmet, my teeth are chattering and I am shaking all over.
Between the speed and the shaking I can’t focus, my vision is a blur and the G-forces ensure I can’t move of my own accord. One turn rapidly runs into another and the experience is as if I have just climbed into a washing machine.
Worryingly, I can’t sense any sort of control from our driver, we just seem to be a large lump of fibreglass and metal hurtling down a polished ice track, flying up banked curves before dropping back down to shoot back up the opposite side until our impending demise.
Whereas at the start of the hill there was time between the turns, now we can’t tell if we were ever out of a turn – and the speed is breathtaking.
In just over a minute, it is over. The sleigh comes to a slow halt and the dawn silence of the Norwegian pine forest is broken by the Dublin-accented passenger sighing a relived expletive – you can imagine the only four-letter word that fits the occasion.
Killian Forde travelled to Lillehammer courtesy of SAS airlines. Topflight offers holidays to Lillehammer and Trysil in Norway
