Inside the deranged and dangerous world of professional bobsleigh

telegraph.co.uk:

Bobsleigh is unique. Anybody who’s seen Cool Runnings – that cult 1990s film about the Jamaican team’s quest to ‘feel da rhythm, feel da rhyme’ and compete in the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics – has a rough idea of how it works, but they’re unlikely to be aware of the extracurricular requirements.First, the racing: four people (or two, or one sometimes, though the four is the blue riband event) stand around a rocket-shaped sled at the top of a 1,300-ish-metre ice track that looks, from a bird’s-eye view, like the kind of doodle somebody scratches when they’re impatiently testing a Biro.The four people consist of one driver (the pilot), who sits at the front and lightly steers the sled by tugging two ropes attached to D-shaped handles, two pushers and a brakeman.

When they’re ready, all four grip handles on the 210kg sled and push as quickly and powerfully as possible for around 50 metres, before leaping into it, cat-like, in the aforementioned order.As the rear three fold themselves to create an aerodynamically perfect line, the brakeman pulls the handles in, leaving only the driver sitting up to see where they’re going.

And then they’re away, like a spooked pantomime horse; a peapod gone berserk. At 90mph, the quickest corners could see athletes hitting a G-force similar to that of a Formula 1 car, and almost double that an astronaut experiences during take-off.If you’ve ever pushed a Waitrose trolley too hard around the end of the pasta aisle and into the dairy, you know the loss of control that can happen when weight and speed are combined.

Well, multiply that by a billion.One bobsleigh competitor said that every turn is ‘like getting kicked in the groin and chest while a truck sits on your head’.