Ashleigh Nelson was never meant to be in the Winter Olympics. If you’d asked her 18 months ago where she expected to be competing this week, she would have told you she would be at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham running the 60m at the UK Indoor Championships, not standing at the top of the world’s newest ice track riding a £75,000 bobsleigh.
“I was tricked into it,” Nelson says. “You laugh, but it’s true.” Nelson only got into it after the GB bob pilot Adele Nicole sent her a message on Instagram just after the Paris Olympics asking if she fancied giving it a go.
“I didn’t know anything about it before I went down, I’d never seen a crash. I didn’t even know people did crash, the closest I’d ever come to a bobsleigh before was watching Cool Runnings,” Nelson says, ahead of the two-woman bob, which starts official practice on Tuesday afternoon before the competition on Friday.
Nelson’s idea of speed was what she could achieve on her own two feet. She is one of the most decorated female sprinters GB has ever had. She was part of 4x100m relay teams that won gold medals in the European Championships in 2014 and the Commonwealth Games in 2022, and silver and bronze medals at the World Athletics Championships in 2013 and 2019, as well as an individual bronze and silver medals at the European and the World Junior and World Youth Championships. It was only four years ago she was picked as the team captain for the European Championships in Munich.
Then everything went wrong. “I’d had a brilliant year, there was no reason for me to think I would stop. Then I got injured.” It was her achilles. The doctors gave her six months to recover, then decided she needed to have surgery. It cost her a year of competition. “I would have loved to have been at the Paris Olympics, but it was all just too much of a rush.” She was 32 and “ready to retire” when she got that Instagram message.
“It caught me at a vulnerable time,” Nelson says. “I didn’t make the Olympic Games and it was around that time Adele messaged me, I was feeling a bit sad and vulnerable, so when she said: ‘Do you fancy bobsleigh?’ I was like ‘maybe’. And then 18 months later I’m at the Winter Olympics, which is a bit bizarre.”
There’s a long history of track athletes making the crossover from one sport to the other, bobsledders need to have that explosive sprinting ability to set the sled off and running down the mountain. Joel Fearon, James Dasaolu, Mark-Lewis Francis, and Montell Douglas are just a few who have made the switch.
But it’s not for everyone. As Nelson found out when she tried it for the first time during a training camp in Lillehammer.
“There’s no cushion. There’s no seatbelt. There’s no airbags,” says Nelson. “The first time I went down I was told: ‘Whatever happens, just hold on tight, don’t let go.’ When I got to the bottom my body was in shock, I’d had a lot of caffeine and when I got out of the sled my nervous system was on edge. I just said: ‘What was that?’”
The experience of being a passenger in a bob, if you’ve never been lucky enough to try it, is something like being stuck in the drum of a washing machine and tossed down a mountain. Nelson comes from a sporty family. Her brother was a sprinter, her father played for Stoke, her cousin Curtis plays for MK Dons. But this was a first, even for them.
“I called my mum afterwards and said: ‘Mum, I don’t think this is for me,’” Nelson says. “And my mum said: ‘Well you’ve gone all the way to Norway, you’re supposed to be there for two weeks, just stick it out.’” A few days later she had her first run with Nicole as her pilot, “and that wasn’t so bad. You still get rattled, and some tracks are worse than others, but when I’ve got a driver like Adele I know that I’m safe.” Which still doesn’t necessarily mean Nelson enjoys it. She cheerfully admits that she races with her eyes tight shut.
“Why am I going to open them?” Nelson laughs. The large part of her work is in the first 50m, and she’s exceptionally good at it. “I’m fast, I’m strong, I’m not just here because I’ve got nice hair,” she says “I squat 260kg.” But after that “I’m in the back with my head tucked between my legs holding onto the sled! I can’t see anything that’s happening. I memorise the track and I count the corners so I know where I am, but when you’ve got your eyes closed and you’re going 80mph you’ll forgive me if I get a bit disorientated.” After the year she’s had, you can.