Craig Pickering: Bobsleigh, Bad Backs, and Baths

Cover Point Sport speaks to British sprinter and bobsleigh athlete, Craig Pickering, as he reflects on his successes, injuries, and the prospect of retirement.

Craig Pickering sounds like the odd one out when you put him together with the names, Derice Bannock, Sanka Coffie, Junior Bevil, and Yul Brenner. In a sense, he is. He is real, and not a fictional character for starters. He is also not from Jamaica. But beyond that, these five names share the sort of bizarre similarity the knowledge of which may well bring you victory in a pub quiz tiebreaker some years from now! They are all frighteningly fast, they all wanted to run the 100m in the Olympic Games, and they all had to ‘make do’ with a career in an even more frighteningly fast sport instead – bobsleigh.

Craig Pickering at full pace on the track

The list of names above are certainly an eclectic mix! Four are from the cult classic film ‘Cool Runnings’, while one is from the British Winter Olympic squad. Or was, until a slipped disc resulted in the spine numbing agony of having to pull out of the squad just a week before the Sochi games began last month.

Pickering’s career has been blighted by misfortune. After bursting onto the athletics scene as a fired up, pumped up, talked up young sprinter, many rightly assumed he would be Britain’s next great sprinter. A quick glance at Youtube shows many an exciting duel in his early years with Dwayne Chambers and Mark Lewis Francis. Yet, somehow he never quite came to fulfil this talent. Be it dropping the baton in the Men’s 4×100 meter relay in Beijing in 2008, or suffering from an ongoing set of back problems, most significantly in a winter training camp ahead of the 2012 London Olympics, luck has not been in the 27-year-old’s favour. Indeed, his Twitter description currently reads ‘World’s unluckiest athlete’.

Yet Pickering’s tale is no sob story. The physical and mental pain of having to spend his home Olympics lying flat on his back was enough to drive him to come back fitter and stronger, as well as convince him that a fresh challenge was needed.

“I was pretty upset at the time,” the Crawley born athlete explains. “The pain was also excruciating. I basically had to spend my whole time lying on my right side or flat on my back because the disk was pressing on the nerve. I had to rest my head on a door to sneeze too!”

Questioning whether he would ever have the raw speed to challenge the top names in the business again, and on the back of having lost his lottery funding, Pickering spoke to his friend and fellow sprinter Joel Fearon, who himself had made the transition from 100 metres to bobsleigh.

“I’d always had bobsleigh in the back of my mind as a way to extend my athletics career, but I certainly hadn’t considered it until that point,” Pickering explains.

Pickering training for the bobsleigh at the National Centre in Bath

Pickering spent a day testing at the start of December 2012, and was competing in the world championships at Konigssee just six weeks later. “I was completely out of my depth at the start,” he chuckles. “Once you are in a bob, you are completely out of control. You’ve got your head down and you can’t do anything. If you crash, you don’t see it coming.”

I wonder whether the high risk of spectacular crashes that come hand in hand with the sport, and the resultant friction burns meant a literal ‘baptism of fire’ for him. “Amazingly, I didn’t actually crash for a year. That’s mainly because Lamin Dean is such a good driver”.

Anyone would think not crashing was a good thing, but Pickering explains that the fear of it ground him down every time until he got into the bobsleigh until it eventually happened. “It wasn’t actually nearly as bad as I thought it would be,” he explains. “We entered a corner, stayed on a bit too late and then rolled off the side. I felt a bang, and all of a sudden my head was on the ice. It takes a while to realise. You then have to push up on the ice with your head to minimise the impact of the burns. It wasn’t even that painful!” That’s certainly a novel way of looking at a 90mph accident!

Then again, Pickering is in a better position than most to talk about pain. “I’d rather crash every time I get into a bob than have an injury,” he convinces me. “You just suck it up really. Instinct takes over, and after that I relaxed a lot more and it was a lot better.”

Pickering’s progress in the sport has been rapid. The similarities in the physical requirements of his old and new sports are clear for all to see – a need for explosive speed and power at the start, and to keep your nerve thereafter. Add in the team element, and comparisons with a relay on the track could be drawn.

“It’s a lot harder than a relay,” Craig argues. “For starters, the actual team element of a relay is only a very small percentage of the race, whereas in a bob, once you’re on the track you’re working as a team. You have to be completely instantaneous with the rest of the guys. Aside from that, getting into the bob is actually a lot harder than you think!”

This team element is something Pickering has clearly enjoyed, and makes a change from the solace which can sometimes accompany the athletics circuit. “You travel as a crew for four months in bobsleigh. You’re basically driving across Europe in a transit van, staying in cheap hotels, without much money to spend,” he explains.

It couldn’t be further from the glitz and glamour of the Bolts and Blakes and their accompanying entourage of fans and photographers. “It’s actually very refreshing,” Pickering assures me. “There isn’t really any room for egos in bobsleigh. Nobody really grows up wanting to be in bobsleigh anyway (the sport also has just £3 million worth of funding for an Olympic cycle, compared to more than £25 million athletics benefits from). So everyone who does go into it is usually a failed athlete. People are more light-hearted and chilled as a result, and everyone is less serious away from competition as they have a bit more perspective.”

There is still a phenomenal amount of commitment and work required however. Whereas the majority of training for the track takes place on the track itself, the role gravity plays in bobsleigh means there is a significant focus on gaining strength in the gym. “You have to be in the gym every day. There are a lot of squats and weights based around gaining weight. The sprints are also a lot shorter as at the start you’re typically only running for 50 meters,” Craig points out.

Pickering with his team-mates

Pickering’s pace seemed to have powered him into the British team for Sochi when disaster struck again whilst at the holding camp a few weeks out from the Olympics. “I hadn’t had any problems with my back since starting bobsleigh so it came as a big shock.” Well attuned to the severity of what a seemingly innocuous pain in the back can become, Pickering flew home to seek medical expertise. After a scan, it was clear that the third consecutive disk in his back was damaged, and his Sochi dream was over.

“I didn’t have much time to reflect, to be honest. It was tough though. If I’d been 20, it would have been even more gutting. I think I’ve matured a bit since then though and I don’t like to sit around wallowing.”

Pickering showing support for his team-mates on Sochi finals day! C. Craig Pickering

The original scene from the film, ‘Cool Runnings’

On the day of the bobsleigh final itself, while his fellow bobsleigh team-mates could be seen bombing down the Sochi track, Pickering uploaded a photo of himself on Twitter back at his home in Bath in full bobsleigh kit, wallowing in the bath in support of his team-mates. Aside from an ability to run fast, and throw himself down an icy track at 90mph, Pickering shares more in common with those four names from Cool Runnings than one might think. As he contemplates his retirement, his story outlines the fact that it is not just about the end result in a 100m race or a bobsleigh race. It’s about what you learn along the way.

In the words of John Candy in Cool Runnings, “A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it”. You sense the bumpy ride Craig Pickering has faced has helped him learn he’s enough without it.