Ashleigh Nelson is in the mix for a bobsleigh medal at the Winter Olympics – but that doesn’t mean she enjoys it
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shleigh Nelson was never meant to be in the Winter Olympics. If you’d asked her 18 months ago where she expected to be competing this week, she would have told you she would be at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham running the 60m at the UK Indoor Championships, not standing at the top of the world’s newest ice track riding a £75,000 bobsleigh.
“I was tricked into it,” Nelson says. “You laugh, but it’s true.” Nelson got into it only after the GB bob pilot Adele Nicoll sent her a message on Instagram just after the Paris Olympics asking if she fancied giving it a go.
“I didn’t know anything about it before I went down, I’d never seen a crash. I didn’t even know people did crash, the closest I’d ever come to a bobsleigh before was watching Cool Runnings,” Nelson says, before the two-woman bob, which starts official practice on Tuesday afternoon before the competition on Friday.
