Bobbing Along

If I said to you 'football', you would no doubt be confused as to to the agenda of this tall bearded man yelling the names of sports at you without any sense of practical syntagmatical understanding. However, if I subsequently explained how I wanted you to tell me what you intrinsically associated with that sport then football could bring any number of responses, such is the way it is littered across both popular culture and our own personal lives. However, if I were to ask you to do the same for bobsleigh then the chances are you will respond with two words; 'Cool Runnings'.

The film Cool Runnings dramatised the Jamaican bobsled team's participation in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, but whilst most people will be able to name one of the film's bobsled crew, and no doubt be able to quote many a line from the film too, few people will be able to name any genuine bobsledders. That's because bob-sled is one of those sports, along with curling, skeleton, sailing and modern pentathlon, which only enter the general public conscience once every four years. In the mean time these sports are rounded up and corralled into one unspecific 'Olympic Sports' category on the BBC website and left to carry on like a TV soap extra, just going about there business silently in the background.

One of the key problems with this temporal abandonment comes from the fact that Great Britain's standing in many of the world's less popular sports is much better than Olympic performances necessarily reflect. A lot can happen in four years which subsequently goes under, or just plainly un-reported. Which draws us back to the bobsleigh, an incredibly fast-paced and dangerous sport, exciting and enthralling to watch, but another which is only seen when linked to from a large sofa and implausibly vast and expensive table by Hazel Irvine.

Not only is bobsleigh exciting to watch, and of course a lot less life endangering than the ice-slope on a dinner-tray sports of skelton or luge, but it is also one in which Great Britain can currently boast World Champions. At the weekend the female British duo of Nicola Minichiello and Gillian Cooke claimed the World Championship with victory at Lake Placid, USA. A great acheivement on its own, but even more of note for a country in which there are no actual bobsleigh tracks. Instead the British team trains on a one hundred and twenty metre track, tucked behind the trees and just beyond the football pitches at the University of Bath. Its not quite a box-cart derby and a lucky egg, but its still a story which deserves more than just leap year style coverage.