Olympic push for bobsleighers

IRELAND'S second attempt to bob sleigh itself to Olympic glory looks certain to get a major boost. The International Olympic Committee's Solidarity Fund has committed itself to assisting the Irish team to prepare for the next two Winter Games.

The committee which controls the fund will invest some £75 million over the next four years in promoting the Olympic movement worldwide. While the final value of the assistance has yet to be decided, it has agreed to back the Irish bobsleigh team as a means of helping Ireland to take part in the Winter Games.

Having silenced the sceptics with a highly-respectable performance in Albertville, France, representatives of the Irish Bobsleigh and Luge Association are hoping that the extra funding will help them to prepare a far stronger team for Nagano, Japan, next February, and Salt Lake City,

US, in the year 2002.

They expect to sit down with Pat Hickey, of the Olympic Council of Ireland, over the coming week to "nail down" details of the grants.

Hickey, an IOC member who sits on the Solidarity Fund sub-committee, argued that projects like the Irish bobsleigh team were ideal targets for funding as the involvement of additional nations in the Winter Games was just the sort of task for which the fund was intended.

The Dubliner received support from other countries which might expect to benefit from this sort of move. He said he believed the value of the support to the Irish team would run into "tens of thousands of pounds".

"I hope so," said team manager and association president Pat McDonagh, who estimates that the cost of preparing the bare four-man team for the trip to Japan would run to £50,000 over the coming year.

"That would be to do the thing right while it might go to more if we were to buy some equipment rather than just leasing it out each year," he said.

Travel and accommodation expenses for the current four-man team of Terry McHugh, Peter Donohoe, Jeff Pamplin and Simon Linscheid, along with McDonagh, will account for a large part of the money, with qualifying events for the next games getting under way in mid-October.

"There are two routes to qualification, either through the Europa Cup circuit or the World Cup circuit and we are hoping to try both," says team brakeman Linscheid. "The way it works is that you get points at each event, depending on your performance, and you need 20 points to qualify for Japan.

"To put it in context, though, we went to two events this year and got 11 points at one and five at the other. Next year, we'll be going to a lot more events so there's no reason why we shouldn't make it."

Linscheid believes the team - it currently spends much of its time training on wheels - can climb well up the rankings. He cited the example of Britain which, despite a similar lack of suitable training sites, has consistently achieved top 20 status on the circuit in recent seasons.

The team has received some assistance from the International Bobsleigh Federation (FIBT) and from Adidas. It is hoped that the additional profile from the new funding will help to attract backing from the commercial sector. This may also encourage others in Ireland to become involved in bobsleighing.