The monobob stars Elana Meyers Taylor and Kaillie Humphries have dominated in Olympic and world competitions—and overcome more than just bobsled-medal inequities.
, hockey shoot-outs, and the quiet ongoing dominance of Norway, but a new frontier in women’s bobsled, which concludes Saturday, with the medal event in the two-person sled competition. Last weekend, viewers got better acquainted with its stars, via a new Olympic event: monobob. As it approached, NBC did its cheerful best not only to psych us up for monobob but to tell us what it was. “A new bobsled event, called the monobob!” the tireless sports broadcaster Mike Tirico told viewers.
As on other surfaces, gender inequity has long prevailed on the world’s ice tracks. Bobsled, part of the Winter Olympics since they began, in 1924, didn’t include women’s events until 2002, and there were fewer of them: men compete in four- and two-person bobsleds, but women competed only in two-person ones. The event disparity, owing in part to a belief that bobsledding was too heavy and dangerous for women, resulted not just in more medals for men but in more men participating over all.
Bobsledding, which occurs in an ice chute, like other sliding sports—luge, skeleton—developed in the late nineteenth century among wealthy lodgers at a ski resort in St. Moritz. This is one reason why many of us don’t quite get it. We mightor skate; we are less likely to luge, and bobsledding isn’t much like what we do in a toboggan. It’s known mostly as part of the Olympics, when, every four years, we observe feats of skillful snow-and-ice audacity on TV.
Monobob, too, lends itself to vivid imaginings. For one thing, it’s mysterious: for much of the event, the athlete’s body is largely obscured, all helmet and car. We see her most at the beginning, while she’s pushing the sled at top speed in order to leap into it. This part takes incredible power—training videos show Meyers Taylor, whom commentators have called one of the U.S. delegation’s physically strongest athletes, hoisting comically enormous barbells.
Twenty participants from sixteen countries competed in monobob’s début. These included Huai Mingming, of China, who last year sang a song called “Burning Snowflake” on a nationally televised Lunar New Year broadcast, and bobsledders from Jamaica, South Korea, Germany, and Ukraine.
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