Maitland’s Hayden Dark missed out on being part of the Australian Bobsled Team at the Winter Olympics in Italy by just one heartbreaking qualifying spot.
Bobsled isn’t a sport for the feint hearted. Teams of two or four hurtle at up to 150km/hr in a small sled down an ice run hitting up to five G’s on some corners.
30-year-old Hayden spent much of November last year to mid-January with the team getting the G’s up overseas at the North American Cup accumulating as many qualification points as possible. Qualification involved 14 races across two and four-man sleds in Calgary, Whistler, Salt Lake City and finally Lake Placid.
Each country and federation has their own qualifying quotas for the Winter Olympics, and it was down to the wire for the Aussies.
“The four-man just wasn’t clicking how we’d like it to at Lake Placid. We were trying to chase down Israel, but they got away from us. We managed to hold off the Croatia and Czech teams and honestly up until the end of the season we thought we were going to the Olympics.
“We then turned our attention to Israel; we were under the impression they weren’t going to accept their spot due to their internal qualification quotas but unfortunately their Federation backflipped and sent them anyway,” Hayden reflected.
While they didn’t make it to Italy this year, Hayden said the team had improved in leaps and bounds.
“We PB’d every single track, PB’d our push times; the difference in a year was like night and day. It’s a sport that becomes second-nature the more you do it.
“The more that the boys know when to jump in, the down call, the little things can make a hundredth of a second difference. Sitting down in the sled at exactly the same time can give you an extra half a length of velocity going into the first corner. Our first race we came 12th in the two-man, but we were literally 13 hundredths of a second away from 6th place – that’s how close it is!”
While the race itself is a minute or less, there are hours of preparation not only for the team but for the sled as well. Hayden said they spend up to six hours a day polishing the runners, making sure everything is dry and greased well, all to get down the track as fast as humanly (or inhumanly) possible.
“There was one day we were rushed putting the runners on the sled just before a race. The runners have protectors on them and when we went to flip the sled one of the protectors came off and the runner fell straight onto the concrete. It got chewed up and we had no time to fix it. We pushed slower than we ever had and finished 15th in that race.”
Hayden said despite not quite making it to Milano in Italy, it was an incredible experience he wants to be a part of again.
“As a team it was a breeze. You’d think living with four other smelly dudes for 12 weeks would drive you nuts but we loved it. The highlight was definitely the fifth place our two-man team got at Lake Placid; even though I wasn’t in the race it felt like a really cool team achievement.”
