The true story of Britain’s bobsleigh champions – one of the greatest moments of sportsmanship ever seen at the Winter Olympics
In February 2010, the world’s Winter Olympic athletes will be summoned to the twenty-first great tournament of sub-arctic endeavour in Vancouver. However, it is now close to half a century ago that Great Britain achieved its most remarkable feat at the winter games . . .
As it is now, so it was back then. In 1964 it had been the best part of 30 years since the British won a medal in perhaps the most hazardous and exciting event at any winter Olympics – the bobsleigh. (Indeed, there had been only two British successes on the Olympic runs in the entire history of the winter games.) But, before the sixties had truly begun to swing, two young men – Tony Nash and Robin Dixon – drove a GB bob to the heights of Olympic gold for the first time.
It took Britain 34 years to find another team to reach the Olympic rostrum, and Innsbruck 1964 remains the only occasion when our bobsleigh team scaled the Olympian heights. In Olympic Gold Run, Brian Belton celebrates the achievement of Nash and Dixon – with the full cooperation of the athletes themselves.
As Robin Dixon – now Lord Glentoran – tells it, their one-off Winter Olympic triumph was made all the more remarkable by the circumstances. For both young men came upon the sport of bobsleigh racing by chance, as suggested by Dixon’s long lost relative, the infamous Lord Lucan . . . |
Browse Books
