WHAT do you do if you’re a bobsleigh driver, stuck in your hometown of Consett during a Covid lockdown, and therefore unable to train? If you’re Mica McNeill, whose hopes of reaching a second Winter Olympics were hanging by a thread when the world shut down in March 2020, the answer is simple. You rope in your dad and brother, and build a bobsleigh track in your back garden.
“I think people thought we were mad at first,” joked McNeill, whose place on the British team for next month’s Beijing Olympics in the two-woman bobsleigh was confirmed yesterday. “I’d moved back to Consett when the pandemic hit, but if we were going to make it to the Olympics, we needed to train, especially when no one really knew how long Covid was going to last.
“We were asking how we were going to be able to train, but still be safe and stick to the rules, and the answer was to build our own push track. My dad and brother built it for me – I just watched and passed them some tools every now and then.
“It’s literally in the back garden of the house. I was able to use it at first, and then once the restrictions started to be lifted, the other girls on the team would come up and we’d have our own Olympic training camp in Consett. We can get 30 metres of pushing out of it before we have to jump in.
“Getting my dog used to it was a bit of a challenge – she tried to run alongside us at first, but she quickly learned that if she ran too close to the sled, she was put in the house. Then Dave and Maureen next door were brilliant about it. It’s a monstrosity really, just in the garden, and it’s not a quiet thing, but they’re so supportive of the whole team.”
There can’t be many North-East homes with a built-in bobsleigh track, but thinking outside the box comes naturally to McNeill, who was forced to crowdfund her way to the last Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang in 2018 when her funding was removed less than a year before the start of the Games.
Financially, things have been a lot less fraught this time around, with DHL having committed to McNeill’s team as headline sponsors at an early stage of the build-up towards Beijing.
“When DHL decided to support us a team, and when the sled went yellow, that was a massive moment for us because we knew we were going to be supported right the way through to Beijing,” said McNeill. “Without DHL, I’ve honestly no idea whether I’d be in this position now because it’s taken a sponsor to back us to get us all the way there.
“They’ve been amazing with us – they’ve paid for a new sled, got us coaches, paid for competitions and camps. That’s meant me and Monty (Montell Douglas, brake-woman) have been together for the whole of the Olympic cycle and that’s a huge thing. We’ve been through everything together, and I’m so happy to be standing on the start block with her in Beijing.”
The financial concerns that were all-consuming four years ago might not have reappeared, but that is not to say that the last two years in particular have not been a challenge.
“It’s been a completely different build-up,” said McNeill. “But both Olympic seasons have had so many hurdles, in different ways. Obviously, we haven’t had to crowdfund things this time around, but it’s still been another one of those seasons where a million hurdles have just sprung up around us.
“There’s been injuries, illnesses, Covid restrictions, but when you have all of those downs, it just makes the ups so much more rewarding.”
The biggest of those ups came earlier this month when McNeill and Adele Nicoll, who will be travelling to Beijing as a reserve, won Britain’s first World Cup medal since 2009 as they claimed silver in the World Cup event in Sigulda.
That success was a major factor in securing Olympic qualification, but McNeill and Nicoll still headed into last weekend’s final World Cup round in St Moritz needing to finish in the top 12 to claim a place in Beijing. With the pressure on in the final descent, McNeill steered superbly to finish 11th.
“In the past, we’ve peaked as a team in October-November, and started to plateau a bit towards the end of the season with fatigue and injuries creeping in,” she said. “This year, with the Olympics in February, we knew that was when we needed to be peaking.
“We didn’t think we’d have so many hurdles early on though. I had some personal health issues before Christmas that really hindered qualification. The plan was to get qualification squared off pre-Christmas and come into form post-Christmas, but that didn’t happen.
“The qualification struggled, and we really did come down to the last race. It was a lot of pressure, so we’re just so happy to have qualified and we do feel like we’re hitting our best form this time around.”
Four years ago, in Pyeongchang, McNeill and her then partner, Mica Moore, achieved Team GB’s best-ever result in a Winter Olympic two-woman bobsleigh competition as they finished eighth. Topping that next month will be a challenge, but McNeill feels it is a realistic goal.
“I’d absolutely love to beat my own British history marker, and make new British history again,” she said. “For a small nation, that’s not a winter sport nation, I just want to keep pushing those boundaries and get the best result that’s physically possible for Great Britain.”
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