DESIGNED FOR SPEED
Saskatoon’s Josh Dornan, a fourth-year graphic design student at Toronto’s George Brown College, devised the paint job for the bobsleds and skeletons that Canadian athletes will be using at the Pyeongchang Games in South Korea.
Canada’s Olympic bobsled and skeleton teams were named in Calgary on Wednesday, and with the announcement came the unveiling of the new-look sleds they will take down the tracks at the Pyeongchang Games.
That’s when everything sunk in for the artist behind the new design, Josh Dornan. The 27-year-old graphic design student from Saskatoon is in his final year of study at Toronto’s George Brown College and was onstage for the announcement.
“I felt like ... in a way, it was my moment as well for myself, where I was really proud of what I did and to be able to sit up there with all those Olympians was kind of my proof we did something awesome,” he said via telephone from Calgary.
“They look like they’re ready to go. I can’t wait to see them in Korea,” he said.
Dornan was hired on after he contacted Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton, offering to design the sleds for this year’s Games if they didn’t already have a designer. He knew BCS used a student design for the sleds they used at the Sochi Games in 2014.
His design is based on the Canada 150 CF-18 that toured the country last year. The celebratory CF-18’s look was created by Jim Belliveau, a former 410 Squadron graphic designer. Dornan saw the CF-18 at a Toronto FC soccer game in Toronto.
The theme itself was inspired by the bond formed between the athletes and the Royal Canadian Air Force. In the lead-up to the 2018 Games, RCAF members helped bobsled and skeleton athletes mentally prepare for competition.
“It (was) an incredible, powerful, national flag really that was streaking across the sky, and so, when we started to consider what we wanted to do with this air force partnership, it was pretty obvious; you could draw those parallels easily between the sport of bobsled or skeleton and a jet fighter pilot,” Dornan said.
“We wanted to take something that would instil a lot of national pride in people and also something people would be able to recognize.”
The challenge was to take Belliveau’s original concept and adapt it for the sleds, and in doing so also make each team’s sled look unique.
Dornan wasn’t nervous about Wednesday’s unveiling. Rather, he was breathing easy after he saw the sleds assembled, he said.
“Even though it may be scary to put your work out there, it’s a lot easier to put your work out there when you love it, when you know that it’s the best that it could be,” he said.
Moose Jaw’s Ben Coakwell is the lone athlete from Saskatchewan named to the 2018 Bobsleigh team. The 30-year-old former Huskie football player also represented Canada at Sochi.