Jamaica’s Bobsleigh team, so poignantly portrayed in the Disney movie hit Cool Runnings, are back in business with some members currently training in England for the 2022 Olympic Games.
The 1993 comedy drama Cool Runnings was loosely based on the remarkable true story of the Jamaica Bobsleigh team’s debut in the competition during the 1988 Winter Olympics in Canada, when those involved had never seen snow.
And now members of Jamaica’s latest Bobsleigh team, who missed out on making the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea by being just one position too low in the world rankings, have taken to the slopes at the UK’s largest indoor slope at The Snow Centre inHemel, Hempstead.
The coronavirus crisis has put paid to the usual regime of fitness and resistance training in the gyms, so a trio of 2022 Winter Olympic hopefuls have got into gear and have got creative with a Mini Convertible at The Snow Centre in Hertfordshire.
A trio have today been busy pushing a MINI Convertible, draped in the bold colours of the Jamaican flag, up and down the snowy incline for the ultimate resistance training.
Shanwayne Stephens, a lance corporal in the Royal Air Force and the pilot for Jamaica’s Bobsleigh team, gained notoriety in June after pushing his fiancee’s Mini Cooper around Peterborough – the English city where he moved to from Jamaica aged 11 in 2001 – with team-mate Nimroy Turgott.
Queen Elizabeth II, the world’s longest living reigning monarch, praised Stephens in a virtual meeting after being impressed by his viral video showing his training exercises.See https://youtu.be/F6QpqXqzYD4
And Stephens is back undertaking resistance training with another Mini, this time with new team-mates Dy’Neal Fe’ssal and Matthew Wilson. While Stephens is an old hand in the competition, the latest recruits have never been in a bobsled nor even seen one.
The trio are part of the group in training to qualify for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, as well as various competitions across Europa and North America. Their next scheduled major event, subject to restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, is the World Championships in Lake Placid, New York, next February.