Nigerian women's bobsled team

Many Winter Olympic sports that require significant facilities and money to get into have seen whole areas of the globe not even compete at the Olympics. Bobsled is one of those; only 54 nations have ever took part in bobsled at the Games, and no team from Africa has ever competed. Three women from Nigeria are hoping to change that in 2018. Here’s more on their story from the BBC:

Fighting freezing winds, bone-breaking speed and up to five g-force, the Nigerian women’s bobsleigh team are training hard in western Canada.

Driver Seun Adigun and brakewomen Ngozi Onwumere and Akuoma Omeoga are all former professional track and field athletes.

Indeed they are. Adigun competed for the University of Houston in track and field, and wound up winning three Nigerian 100m hurdles titles and representing the country in the 2012 London Olympics. Four months ago, she wrote a GoFundMe post about what inspired her to take up bobsled and recruit her teammates:

By 2016, I was inspired to start the Nigerian Women’s Bobsled team in hopes of being the first ever African representative, men or women, to qualify for the Winter Olympic Games in the sport of Bobsled.

Starting the Nigerian Women’s Bobsled team was not an easy decision, but I know it will be one of the most impactful things I will ever initiate. The fate of Nigeria’s eligibility to be represented in the 2018 Winter Olympics rests exclusively on my ability to qualify as a competent driver. I decided to accept this responsibility and recruited two wonderful young women, Ngozi Onwumere and Akuoma Omeoga, as my brakemen.

That GoFundMe has raised almost $20,000 towards training costs, impressive but not near Adigun’s goal of $150,000. However, the team has done some impressive things in training. Here’s a report on them from Salt Lake City CBS affiliate KUTV in January:

At that time, the team needed to finish five trial events before 2018. They’ve done two, so they only have three left to go. And they have some talent. That KUTV report has them making one clean run, then crashing near the end of their second one, but doing well enough to still slide across the line. They obviously still have some learning to do, but there’s potential here. If Adigun and her teammates can pull it off, this could be the best bobsled story since Cool Runnings.

[Photo by Obi Grant, via the team’s GoFundMe page]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.