The BMW IBSF World Cup tour may have moved on from Lake Placid to Park City — and indeed from Park City to Whistler, B.C., by the time you see this — but I still have photos from Lake Placid that I want off my disk drive, so you get to see the women’s bobsled race today. Like the other races, the women’s bobsled was the first event of the World Cup calendar this year, which is compressed and shifted earlier due to the Winter Olympics being held in Korea in February (assuming Trump doesn’t start a war with North Korea by then). The World Cup results in each discipline will determine the number of quota slots each national team earns, and for most teams will also determine the ranking of the individual athletes. In bobsled, World Cup points are assigned to the driver, and teams (especially the deep teams like Germany, Canada, and the U.S.) will frequently switch out brakemen (pushers) and sleds between events, looking for the best performing combinations. However, the same athletes must race both heats of an individual event in the same sled. This photo gallery includes 112 photos showing both heats: photos from the first run were taken at the start, and photos from the second run were taken at the finish. As with skeleton, only the top 20 competitors in the first heat make the flip to the second, but the competitive field in women’s bobsled is quite small (the largest teams are limited to three sleds in the World Cup) so all finishers made the cut. (One sled, the sole Austrian entry, crashed and did not reach the finish line, so they were not able to make a second run.)
For race-time transportation and weighing, the bobsled runners are protected with these “scabbards”, which are lined up in the finish area in the order that the competitors will come down the track. Away from the competition, the runners are dismounted entirely to protect them; a driver will often have one preferred set of runners on which her sled performs best, although of course the team will also carry backups in case of accidents (such as overrunning the runout track, which happened to one of the men’s teams during training in Park City the week after this event).
Walking up the hill from the finish area to the start, I was passed by one of the Russian women going downhill on her warm-up. Half a minute or so later, she turned around and started back up the hill.
The bobsled races use three forerunners: two on skeleton sleds, one in each starting groove, followed by a third in a bobsled.
Now we get into the actual competitors’ first runs. I stayed in the start area for the entire first run this time, so you’ll see all the competitors from the beginning of heat 1 and then the finishes from heat 2.
Several of the athletes have a ritual of making a jump in the air right before lining up at the block to start.
There are two different starts used: sometimes both athletes start from the blocks, with the brakewoman already having started the sled moving before the driver gets to her push handle, and sometimes the driver starts with her hands on the push handle so both athletes start pushing the sled simultaneously. I’ve never heard an explanation for this.
The Belgian team was mentioned in the commentary as one of the relatively underfunded teams that doesn’t usually come to North America for competitions because of the expense. I have a suspicion that the woman with the long blonde hair (in the blue team jacket) at right in the photo above may actually be one of the athletes, helping out her teammates at the start, and not just a staffer. (If anyone knows for certain, comments are open!)
Christina Hengster/Valerie Kleiser (AUT)
did not finish (crashed, did not maintain enough momentum to pass the finish line)
This, if I recall correctly, was the British team that had to raise their own funding to make the World Cup team this season.
All the women having completed heat 1, we move back down to the finish to see heat 2 and the final results. (At World Championships, four heats are run and the results are determined by combined time. At other IBSF competitions, two heats are the norm — although they do sometimes run multiple races in the same discipline at one event, as happened at at this event when Friday’s four-man bobsled race was canceled and replaced with a second two-man race due to ice conditions.)
At the beginning of the second run, the scabbards are lined up again, but they must be re-ordered to reflect the new start order for heat 2.
As the last-place finishers in heat 1, Konomi Asazu and Natsumi Kawasaki (JPN) were the first women down the track in heat 2.
Not sure what that necklace is that she was showing for the camera….
That’s it for the women’s bobsled. I stuck around in the cold and darkening evening to watch the first men’s bobsled race of the season, and you’ll see a small number of photos from that coming up next.