bobsleigh ticket © Jay Goodrich

Since age 10 I have been enthralled with the bobsleigh. That was the first time I was old enough to realize what it was. I watched every segment of the sport on TV during the Lake Placid Olympics of 1980. I built my own toy bobsleigh run out of clay, cotton and plywood, built bobsleighs to accompany it, and pretended to race all of the different colors of the competing countries. Fast forward to 30 years later and a childhood dream has come to pass. Last week I got to photograph and spectate the 4 man bobsleigh in Whistler, British Columbia. I can tell you that it was the best sporting event I have ever been to, period. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling that 1000 plus pounds of athletes and machine passing at 95 miles an hour generates, within a proximity so close, that I could high-five them. Pure insanity. Try to capture it on film, well on sensor I guess, and it is just plain ridiculous. This is the coolest idea since sliced bread. These are the guys who never let the runners of their flexible flyers rust. With all of this excitement and emotion built from the past 30 years of my life, I decided that one image I had to have was of the final turn, the turn where the riders experience 5 Gs. To put it in a different perspective, that is 5 times the force of normal gravity, and the average person passes out at 9 Gs. Again, did I state this was crazy. I slowed my shutter and tried to maintain focus on the sleds as they went through this turn at lightspeed. If it weren’t for digital, I would never have been able to come up with this image. A USA sled coming through the final turn at the Whistler Sliding Venue. I don’t need to play with those homemade toys anymore.

USA bobsleigh final turn © Jay Goodrich