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Milan: Jamaica’s influence on bobsleigh, and even on the Winter Olympics, has not abated since the Caribbean nation’s highly improbable 1988 four-man sled was depicted, in a fictionalised version, by the 1993 film Cool Runnings.
Cool Runnings inspired innumerable athletes to take up bobsled, or to try alien sports that they had no geographic or cultural basis for attempting.
Jamaica’s four-man bobsled team at the track in Cortina.Credit: AP
Australian bob sledder Bree Walker was among those who cited the movie as influential in her conversion from athletics. This week, Formula 1 maestro Lewis Hamilton was another. “Ever since I was a kid, they inspired me,” said Hamilton.
The late actor John Candy is the most unlikely source of inspiration for athletes, but the movie’s blend of fiction and fact means every bobsledder will be asked about Cool Runnings. In the warm comedy, the Jamaican four-man team endures epic travails, such as the coach Candy character’s dubious past as a competitor, failing equipment, a nasty, scornful East German rival (set in 1988, just before the wall’s fall), and a major crash.
They pick themselves up from the crash, carrying the sled to the finish line in the film’s climax, a case of the filmmakers taking the true story of the 1988 pioneers and adding Hollywood saccharine. The real crew did not carry the sled to the line, they merely crashed.
The cast of the 1993 film Cool Runnings.Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library
But of the countless legacies of Cool Runnings, none is more pertinent than the fact that Jamaica is fielding a bobsled team, in another Winter Olympics, in the face of odds that are almost as steep as the bending Cortina course they will navigate on Saturday.
Two of the four have already competed in the two-man, Junior Harris and pilot Shane Pitter having failed to make the cut for the final 20. Their ranking in the four-man, though, is a respectable, if nonthreatening, 19th. And they’re not the solitary team from what an IOC executive inelegantly termed “non-winter countries” – there’s a Brazilian four-man team, ranked higher than the Cool Runners, while Australia, too, bobs up in the women’s pairs in these Games.
“It’s OK for them to come up to me asking me about Cool Runnings and history and so forth,” said Pitter, during training at Cortina.
“It’s nice to interact with the fans, and I’m going to give them every minute once I have time. Apart from doing the sport, I’m always going to be there to talk to them.
“I’m happy they come up to me and even though the Cool Runnings movie was years ago, we are still it. We are better at it, and we try to actually make it on the podium.”
If Jamaica’s legacy crosses borders and sporting disciplines, it is a history that the current sledders must carry, as much as Candy’s men carried their sled to the finish post-crash.
“This is real life,” said Pitter. “The movie is somewhat fiction, but this is real, real life. We are the real team.
“We’ve got a lot of young athletes on the team and coming on the team. It’s still a development stage. Even though we are young athletes we are the best athletes Jamaica ever had in bobsleigh.”
Jamaica’s four-man bobsled team training in Cortina. Credit: AP
The leitmotif of Cool Runnings – that sport/life is about striving and discovery, rather than mere pursuit of success – isn’t the rationale of Team Jamaica. They aren’t intent on just being there.
Unfortunately for romantics, bobsled has taken a turn towards Hamilton’s sport, in that technological supremacy plays an inordinate part in the outcomes of races.
The German teams won gold, silver and bronze in the two-man and the expectation is that they will occupy most, if not all, the podium, by tomorrow. It’s a twist on Cool Runnings. In this 2026 incarnation, the villain isn’t a country, per se, but a system that means one team, or teams, from countries with superior, aerodynamically built sleds costing millions, will slide faster.
Germany dominate the podium in the two-man bobsled.Credit: AP
“Obviously, as a smaller nation, we would love to have the standard sleds,” said Kiara Reddingius, who is competing with Walker in the two-person sled in Cortina. “The biggest nations have a big influence.”
The Australian pairs, like the Jamaicans, don’t have the slickest sled and did well to finish 10th in the heats on Friday night, qualifying for final runs. This isn’t an issue in Walker’s monobob, where sleds are cookie-cutter standardised.
This question of fairness, in a sport that celebrates Jamaica’s magical existence, was posed to IOC president Kirsty Coventry on the day before the Cool Runners began their four-man heats. Her lengthy response was that the IOC was cognisant of advancing technology and that technology itself could play a role in achieving a level playing field.
Serious about their craft, the Cool Runners have a heaving bandwagon. Rapper Snoop Dog, an arbiter of cool, has detoured from his lucrative American ambassador’s gig to clamour aboard Team Jamaica.
Harris has cooked jerk chicken for Snoop whom he called one of “our biggest fans.”
Snoop Dog, Hamilton and so many others are riding this sleigh, despite the impossibility of medals. This four-man team might not be the best, but they’re surely the coolest.
The Winter Olympic Games is broadcast on the Nine Network, 9Now and Stan Sport.
