There have been some real twists and turns on the way to the 2016 Youth Olympic Games for West Vancouver’s Parker Reid, including a smashed elbow and a scandalous sled change.
The 16-year-old, however, has blasted through it all to make it all the way to the Games starting in two weeks in Lillehammer, Norway, where he’ll been Canada’s lone representative in monobob, a.k.a. one-man bobsleigh.
It took a strange series of events to even get Reid on an ice track in the first place. He was 10 years old when the Olympic Games came to Vancouver and, as part of the hoopla, his elementary class took a trip up the Sea to Sky Highway to try luge at the Whistler Sliding Centre.
There was one problem for Reid though: he was sick, and had to stay home. That could have been the end of it if not for a sliding saviour.
“The principal found out that I was pretty bummed about it so she told me there was another day to go back and try it,” says Reid. When he did get back up to the sliding centre it was summer, and so his first taste of sliding came on a sled outfitted with rollerblade wheels rather than runners. In shorts and a T-shirt on a 30 C day Reid got his first taste of luge racing down a supply road at the back of the Sliding Centre. It was weird, but it was cool enough to convince him to come back once the real track was ready for more action in the winter.
“It was very different from the winter version,” he says. “I liked the speed, and actually fell in love with it once I did it for real.”
From that point on he was hooked, and that meant frequent commutes from West Vancouver to Whistler for training. Reid put himself in position to vie for junior national team spots in luge but then took himself out of the running with a series of injuries. In 2014 he broke his collarbone and missed half a year of competition. When he returned he pushed himself to make a run at junior nationals and ended up smashing his elbow when he hit the roof of the track while travelling at approximately 125 kilometres per hour near the end of a training run.
“It was just a small mistake that exploded a bit,” he says. “It was a fluke that I broke anything, to be honest.”
His luge dreams shattered again, Reid began to hear calls from the dark side – bobsled.
“There’s a pretty big rivalry between luge and bobsled,” Reid says. “They don’t really like each other that much.”
The man doing the persuading was none other than Pat Brown, best known as the coach of the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Olympic Games held in Calgary. The team was immortalized in the movie Cool Runnings, although the coach character, played by the late great John Candy, bears little resemblance – physical or otherwise – to the real-life Pat Brown.
“He’s awesome. He’s a really good coach,” says Reid. “Pat Brown has been bugging me to come and do bobsled for a long time. I finally said yes and have been doing it since.”
Brown sold Reid on the possibility of representing Canada at the Youth Olympics in a defunct event that is making a comeback. Lillehammer will mark the first time that monobob will be included in an International Olympic Committee event.
Monobob is a term that not many will have heard before but it’s actually much easier to explain than his old sport, says Reid.
“Luge – nobody has heard of luge,” he says with a laugh. “Everyone has heard of bobsled. It’s kind of easier to explain that it’s just a one-man bobsled, instead of explaining everything about the sport.”
Reid threw himself into training for his new sport and quickly learned that his years of luge training would be a big help. He’s proven to be an excellent bobsled driver.
“I feel like the reason why I’m pretty good at driving is my luge background, how I started when I was 10,” he says. “It’s almost muscle memory – I understand the pressures, and the way corners work better than someone who has only been doing it for a year or started when they were older.”
In October Reid earned a spot on the world junior circuit and this winter he’s taken part in seven international races, mostly in Europe, scoring consistent top-10 finishes. Once the seven races were complete he was almost certain that he’d scored enough points to make the Youth Olympics but he didn’t know for sure until a confirmation email came from Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton.
“It was one of the best moments of my life so far,” he says of getting the good news. “It’s a great feeling. I love competing for Canada.”
The whole Reid family is going along with him to Norway, including his mother Leesa, father Ken and younger brother Garrett, a 12-year-old who is already on the junior B.C. luge team. Mom Leesa does much of the driving getting Parker up to Whistler for daily training sessions.
She says the sliding sports are sometimes a little scary but she is fully behind her son’s need for speed. She’s even tried out the track herself.
“It’s absolutely amazing. It’s fast,” she says, adding that the speeds she has hit don’t come anywhere close to what her son has done. “Parker is bombing off the top and he’s having a blast. … He’s very good at it. Sometimes I catch my breath, but basically it’s just amazing to watch.”
Parker Reid got a taste of the sport at its highest level last week when the top two-man and two-woman teams in the world came to Whistler for the first World Cup races held on the Olympic track since 2012. Reid got to act as a forerunner, zipping down before the World Cup races began so that organizers could ensure that the track and timing devices were all in working order.
He’s hoping that someday soon he’ll be vying for gold against the best senior drivers in the world, not clearing the track for them.
Monobob is not included in the big-time Olympic program yet but it is proving popular – it helps drivers find time to train without worrying about having a brakeman. Even if monobob doesn’t make it to the senior ranks Reid is comfortable driving a two-man sled and is willing to pursue that course as well.
Wherever he goes in a sled, he’s happy that he made the switch from luge to bob even if he did need to turn his back on his laid-back buddies. His body seems happy with the switch as well.
“It’s much more protected in there,” he says of driving a bobled. “In luge everyone is always complaining about how your head position is – you need to pretty much go down blind. But in bobsled you don’t need to worry about your position so much because you’re inside the bobsled. … Also in a bobsled if you take a hit it’s really not going to hurt that much versus luge where you’re hitting directly to your skin.”
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Information on a GoFundMe campaign for Reid's monobob expenses can be found here.
