The Jamaican bobsled team is used to training without snow, but the coronavirus lockdown has seen its male athletes resort to pushing a car around the streets of an English city to stay in shape, with an eye on Olympic qualification.
Some Peterborough residents have offered to call a tow truck or give mechanical assistance to Shanwayne Stephens and Nimroy Turgott as they push a Mini Cooper down the road, before realizing that it is part of a training regime to work around gym closures in England.
“We had to come up with our own ways of replicating the sort of pushing we need to do, so that’s why we thought: ‘Why not go out and push the car?’” Stephens, 29, said. “We do get some funny looks. We’ve had people run over, thinking the car’s broken down, trying to help us bump-start the car. When we tell them we’re the Jamaica bobsled team, the direction is totally different, and they’re very excited.”
Photo: Reuters
The duo said that they were inspired to join the sport by the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics men’s bobsled team, immortalized in the 1993 film Cool Runnings.
However, they said that they are aiming to qualify for the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022 and then outperform the 1988 team, who did not officially finish the four-man bobsled competition after crashing.
“Those guys set a legacy and a movie came out of it. For me personally, I want to surpass that level and even go beyond that,” Turgott, 27, said.
Turgott, who normally lives in Jamaica, has been staying with Stephens since January, and the pair had always planned to do summer training in Britain, albeit in gyms rather than on roads.
“If you’re able to do the same sort of training without the same equipment, then you should be able to achieve more with the right equipment,” he said.
The pair are focused on qualifying for Beijing. While the woman’s team competed for the first time in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the men’s team failed to qualify.
“The last Olympics, we missed it by one slot — and now we are using that experience as our motivation moving forward,” Turgott said.
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