At the bobsled track, women push for equality

Unlike the men, who have four-man and two-man competitions, there is only one bobsled event for women at the Olympics.

Bobsled is not the only Olympic sport in which women get unequal treatment. Female ski jumpers were not included in the Olympics until 2014, and there is still only one event for women, an individual competition on the normal hill. The men compete in three: normal hill, large hill, and team large hill. Women in biathlon, cross-country and speedskating still compete in races shorter than their male counterparts.

The world’s top female bobsledders — and some top male executives in the sport — say it is past time to put women on equal footing with the men, but they say they are facing pushback from international officials. Opponents of expansion argue that there are not enough female bobsledders in most countries to justify a second event for women, and they fear adding one to the Olympic program would come at the expense of male athletes.

Elana Meyers Taylor, a two-time Olympic medalist and the pilot of the top American team, said that line of reasoning was a Catch-22. The only way to encourage more women to pursue bobsledding, she says, is to let women participate in a four-man competition.

“For most people, they only thing they know about bobsled is ‘Cool Runnings,'” Meyers Taylor said, referencing the 1993 Disney film. “Well, ‘Cool Runnings’ was of course four men in a bobsled, and four-man is considered the highlight of our sport. It’s what everybody knows. It’s what everybody watches. And it’s the big dog of our sport.”

The two-time Olympic gold medalist Kaillie Humphries of Canada, an on-ice rival and off-track ally of Meyers Taylor, also has pushed for the inclusion of a women’s four-man event (the sport refers to the disciplines as “two-man” and “four-man” regardless of the gender of the athletes). Both acknowledge that they need to recruit more women to the sport to help make their case more effectively.

In November 2014, Meyers Taylor and Humphries each piloted four-man bobsleds in a World Cup race. They were the first female pilots to compete in a four-man event after the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation ruled that the discipline was gender neutral. Each woman drove the sleds with three men as the push athletes behind them.

In the four-man event, the pilot begins in the sled, so their strength and speed do not affect the result. Peter van Wees of the Netherlands, a member of the executive board of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, said women can drive the four-man sled and want to. “Now it’s just making sure that our system allows,” he said.

Many women who compete in bobsled say their biggest barrier is a lack of funding for training and competing at international levels. A four-man sled costs tens of thousands of dollars, and that does not count the years of research and engineering behind its construction.

“We’ve seen that with many nations, if they have a limited budget and they have to decide between expanding their men’s program and starting a women’s program, it’s typically women that get cut out of the budget,” said Darrin Steele, the chief executive of USA Bobsled and Skeleton and a vice president of the IBSF.

Mica McNeill, the driver for Britain’s women’s sled here, set up a crowdfunding campaign to finance her team’s run to Pyeongchang to make up for lost funding from her nation’s governing body. In training runs here, her sled ranked second in the field.

The IBSF has set up a working group to try to address the issues that have prevented the progression of women in the sport, specifically focusing on the hurdles that make bobsledding prohibitively expensive.

The international federation is even considering the introduction of a new category: the monobob, a sled for one athlete. The IBSF would purchase a fleet of standardized sleds, making bobsled a contest of strength and driving skill rather than an arms race for the best and most expensive engineering.

The federation is also considering providing sleds in a variety of sizes — including four-man sleds — to athletes to help increase participation, with the goal of attracting more female drivers and more nations to participate.

However, the International Olympic Committee still needs to support expanding the women’s competition, van Wees said. The committee’s Agenda 2020 includes a push for gender equality at the Olympic Games.

But the bobsled federation remains cautious. Allowing women’s bobsled to expand at the Olympics might force some men’s bobsledders to step aside because the IOC limits the number of athletes in each sport.

The total quota for the sport in Pyeongchang was 170 athletes. Only 40 of those slots went to women.

“We have a lot of federations that have invested 10 years and people’s careers that will come to an abrupt end if we say, ‘OK, the U.S. is only allowed two sleds because there is now one four-man for women coming in,'” van Wees said.

While the IBSF could ask for a larger quota, receiving it is not guaranteed.

“It’s just a hard decision to make — because you will end careers of as many male bobsledders as you will add careers for female bobsledders,” van Wees added. “And that’s just your history holding you back.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.