Money runs out for British women’s ‘bobsleigh’ team

LONDON, Sept 20, (RTRS): Britain’s top female bobsleigh driver has turned to crowd-funding to keep her Olympic dreams alive after being told the national federation only had money to take men’s teams to Pyeongchang next year.

“My ambition is, and has always been, to compete at a Winter Olympic Games,” Mica McNeill, a silver medallist at the 2012 youth Winter Olympics and 2017 world junior champion, said on the gofundme page.

The British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association could not be immediately contacted but the BBC quoted the BBSA as saying the programme was “currently focusing resources on winning medals at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

“We are actively seeking commercial funding to further support our world class programme and we will continue to do so,” it added.

McNeill said she had bought her own sled but needed to raise 30,000 pounds ($40,527.00) to compete in the World Cup season and secure her place.

The BBSA is the country’s best funded winter sports body with 11.5 million pounds, 6.5 million going to skeleton and five million for bobsleigh, allocated for the four-year cycle to Pyeongchang.

Bobsleigh’s funding was cut by some 50,000 pounds this year, with implementation of “an agreed Culture Action Plan” a condition of the award.

The British body has been embroiled in controversy, with an independent review launched after allegations by some top athletes of a ‘toxic atmosphere’.

Performance director Gary Anderson and head coach Dominik Scherrer, a Swiss, have left in the past month, although there has been no suggestion of any wrongdoing by either man.

Three times Olympian Lee Johnston was named the new head coach last Saturday.

“I know that bobsleigh is an expensive sport but I just am really disappointed that it has come to this,” McNeill told the BBC. “They tried to tell us it was because we weren’t medal potential but I said, ‘You’re funding three men’s crews.’

“I said, ‘Why don’t you just be honest and say you’re not funding us because there’s no money?’, and they said, ‘Yes, it’s because there’s no money — if there was we’d be funding you’.” had dropped to 21st by the fourth check.

He recovered to finish eighth but some 1min 37.39sec behind Dumoulin.

Froome, who 10 days ago completed a Tour-Vuelta double, seemed a little off the pace at the beginning. Whereas the roads had been dry half an hour earlier, he was amongst the final group that had to contend with rain.

The four-time Tour champion worked his way up from 19th at the first time check to seventh by the fifth and final one ahead of the climb.

From there he gobbled up time on all those ahead of him, except Dumoulin.

But the biggest surprise came from former champion ski-jumper Roglic, who was ninth at the final time-check but produced the fastest climb of anyone — and half a minute quicker than Froome — to surge up to second.

That left Portugal’s Nelson Oliveira, who had been sitting in the provisional leader’s chair for more than an hour, down to fourth, just seven seconds off a medal.

Meanwhile, three years after fleeing his home in war-torn Syria, Ahmad Badreddin Wais was living his dream on Wednesday as he competed in the individual time trial at the cycling world championships in Bergen, Norway.

The 26-year-old was cheered on by local residents on the city centre streets, including 22-year-old Haya who clutched a Syrian flag drawn on a simple piece of paper as she waited for the competition to come by.

Wais, who has a job at a local supermarket in Switzerland where he now resides, was a student in Damascus when the war began in 2012, but continued to train until two years later the unrest and violence made it impossible.

By that time, his family had fled Aleppo for neighbouring Turkey. Wais left in July 2014, first by car to Beirut and then by ship to Turkey where he was reunited with his family.