The United States and the technology race in Olympic bobsled
by Jill Jaracz
When we talked about the bobsled competition at Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956, we touched on the way the sleds were changing, but we could have spent the entire episode just talking about bobsled technology.
As we mentioned on the episode, the hometown-favorites were sliding on Podar sleds, which were more aerodynamic.
However, American driver Art Tyler, an engineer who worked at Eastman Kodak, was also hard at work figuring out how to make bobsleds faster. Tyler focused his efforts on the bottom of the sled.
At the time, sled blades acted like a plank. When drivers went through a curve, the entire sled went on the curve at the same time. Tyler created articulated blades that moved independently of each other, so now the front blades of a sled could turn when they went into or out of a curve, while the back blades didn’t move until they too hit the curved portion of the ice.
Although we’re not talking about a big distance here, articulated blades made sleds take the curves much more smoothly.
Tyler managed to get a bronze with his new four-man sled at Cortina 1956, but after that, the US, once one of the dominant countries in bobsled, was off the podium until 2002.
When bobsleds met auto racing
The work to get back onto the podium started about a decade earlier, when NASCAR racer Geoff Bodine was upset with another poor US performance. Realizing that bobsled racing and auto racing had some things in common, he decided to see how auto racing technology could help the US bobsled team.
By the 1980s, the sport was really using technology and aerodynamics to have sleds with all of the components surrounded by a composite lightweight shell. Europeans were leading the technology race, and Americans were using what Europe would sell them.
The idea that the US did not have its own bobsled technology rankled Bodine, so he and engineer Bob Cuneo, owner of Chassis Dynamics, created the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project to build new American-made sleds. They wanted Team USA bobsledders to have top-of-the-line equipment made from Kevlar, fiberglass and carbon-fiber elements. The cost to the US team? Zero.
Bo-Dyn-built sleds first appeared at Salt Lake City 2002 and helped Team USA sliders take home a gold in the women’s two-man (the first time women competed in bobsled at the Olympics), and a silver and bronze in the four-man.
The development of the Night Train
That didn’t satisfy Bo-Dyn. They kept working on building a better sled. Eight years and $250,000 later, they used carbon fiber composites and an aerodynamic chassis to build the Night Train, the 2010 four-man bobsled that Steven Holcomb drove to victory, the US men’s first gold medal in the four-man event since St. Moritz 1948. Suddenly, the US was back in the mix.
However, things were not so rosy in the relationship between Bo-Dyn and the US Bobsled and Skeleton Federation. In 2011, the two entities stopped working together over a dispute as to who owned the intellectual property on the sleds. That dispute was settled before it went to court, with Bo-Dyn retaining IP rights but allowing the USBSF to modify any sleds it already had.
BMW joins the fold
BMW stepped in to help build the next generation of US sleds. It started with the two-man sled, in hopes of seeing the US’ first podium finish in the event since Oslo 1952, and ideally its first gold medal since Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936.
Through 69 iterations, BMW lightened up the sled by using carbon fiber components, and they also trimmed the length. Redistributed weight helped drivers better manage curves.
Sochi 2014 was the first Olympics for the new two-man sled. The US team of Steve Holcomb and Steve Langton finished third at those Games, but their medal was upgraded to silver due to the Russian doping scandal, which stripped Russia of the gold medal.
Holcomb also drove Night Train 2 in the four-man competition. Bo-Dyn Bobsled came back on board to deliver a new version of that sled. At Sochi, the team took the bronze, but that race was also tainted by the Russia doping scandal, and they were upgraded to silver.
Sled technology at Milano Cortina 2026
Ahead of Milano Cortina 2026, Marc Van Den Berg, USA Bobsled/Skeleton’s director of technology and equipment who joined the federation in 2020, told Forbes that the technology involved with being competitive in the sport today has a hefty price tag: $90,000 for a two-man sled, $140,000 for a four-man sled. Add on $20,000 for one set of steel runners (as we learned from Frank Del Duca and Chris Fogt, today’s teams have multiple sets of runners for a sled), and you’ve got yourself one expensive machine.
Luckily for Team USA, the price tag is zero because its current partners Advance Mfg., deBotech and industrial designer Cameron Dempster donate all of the work and materials.
Unfortunately, the two-man team of Del Duca and TKFLASTANI #1 Josh Williamson finished fourth, just .44 seconds off the podium. The four-man teams finished 11th and 12th, respectively.
The two-woman team of Kallie Humphries and Jasmine Jones took the bronze, while Elana Meyers Taylor and Jadin O’Brien finished 7th. Women also compete in monobob, where rules dictate standardized sleds in order to increase participation in the sport.
Is all this technology good for the sport?
With the amount of money invested in sled technology these days, it’s worth questioning whether all sleds should be standardized. Powerhouse teams like Germany, which is known for its leading-edge technology, have large budgets–and medals to show for it. The country tops the overall leaderboard with 40 medals. Germany also swept the two-man podium at Beijing 2022 and Milano Cortina 2026, and in the four-man, took silver and bronze at both Games.
Up until 1988, fewer than 20 countries participated in bobsled at the Olympics in either the two-man or the four-man. In 1988, warm-weather countries started getting in on the action, led by the Jamaicans. Twenty-three countries participated in the two-man, and 17 were in the four-man.
The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia also increased bobsled’s participation numbers, but it peaked in 2002 with 27 countries in two-man and 26 in four-man (this doesn’t include women’s sleds, which debuted this year).
Since then, Olympic participation has steadily decreased, with only 18 countries participating in men’s bobsled in 2026. Is that decline due to lower quota numbers in the sport, or is the technology barrier too much for many countries to overcome?