Lyndon Rush made his Olympic debut at Vancouver 2010, where he captured bronze with his four-man team and also competed in the two-man event. The Humboldt product went on to compete at Sochi 2014 in both the four-man and two-man before moving into a coaching role with Bobsleigh Canada.
Blog #2
October has come and gone and so has the preseason portion of this Olympic year. The team is now getting ready to head to Cortina, Italy where the bobsleigh world will have its first look at the new track constructed for the 2026 Olympic Games.
At the start of October, the team was in Calgary where we conducted preseason push testing at the Ice House start facility housed at Canada Olympic Park, the home of the 1988 Olympic Games. We use the start practice times to compose the teams that head to Whistler for our on-track evaluation. Putting together the fastest teams is easier said than done and often athletes that test well in the comforts of the 120-metre Ice House, aren’t the fastest pushers at the top of a daunting one-kilometre bobsleigh track. We work hard to get the teams together as soon as possible so they have more time to gel as a cohesive unit but nothing is set in stone, and the teams that will be racing at the Olympics could very well shake up through the course of this year.
We were in Whistler for the last three weeks of October and had great conditions for easing into the season. It’s often rainy and humid this time of year which makes for slower and less consequential ice conditions. Toward the end of the month the temperatures cooled and the ice got faster making for a great build up for getting the pilots up to speed.
Along with getting practice runs in we used this earlier season sliding time to have an evaluation race. It serves as a warmup race as well as another opportunity for the coaches to see how teams perform under race pressure. With the upcoming Olympic season being a compressed schedule, there will not be time for an official Canadian championship race so the athletes had more on the line than a usual evaluation race, knowing that this would be the only time this season they would have the chance to race against all the Canadian teams head-to-head. The race produced some really exciting results especially on the women’s side where a couple of the less experienced athletes outperformed more established teams, serving notice that earning a seat for the Olympics in February will not be a sure thing!
I will be heading to Europe with the World Cup team while the Development team remains in Whistler preparing for the North America Cup. November is taking me to Cortina Italy for a 10-day international training period followed by the first World Cup race of the season, Nov. 22-23, on the brand-new track built for the Olympics. We’ll wrap up November with World Cup #2 in Innsbruck, Austria, Nov. 29-30. In between those two events, I’ll also celebrate my 45th birthday on Nov. 24.
Looking forward to updating you all on in the next blog!
Blog #1
The kids are back in school and the days are getting shorter which can only mean one thing; bobsleigh season is just around the corner.
It’s not just any season this year but an Olympic season that is upon us and that makes for some subtle differences in how we prepare for the upcoming tour. Like all other sports that have the Olympics as the pinnacle, we at Bobsleigh Canada make our plans in four-year blocks that we call “quads”.
If all goes to plan (it never does) the first two years of a quad have an emphasis on development. This means the organization puts a lot of effort into building foundational elements such as figuring out new equipment strategies and teaching drivers how to navigate new tracks. When we get into the second half of the quad things get more focused. We take the best tested equipment and put it into the hands of the drivers that rose to the top of the class while putting the fastest push start athletes with them. This is when we see how we stack up against the best in the world on the World Cup Circuit.
The World Cup Circuit is an annual eight-race series that takes place at tracks mostly in western Europe and North America. As the Olympic year approaches, the competition at the World Cup ratchets up, but the key indicator on performance happens at the ninth and final race of the season, the World Championships! Worlds happen every year except for Olympic years and are a great dress rehearsal for the Olympics.
This is where we currently find ourselves, entering the Olympic season after three World Championships which honestly showed mixed results. As is so often the case, we find ourselves in the bubble group of the competition. Our women’s team especially has had some promising results but have had a tough time with consistency, while our men’s team is rebuilding after a slew of retirements following the 2022 Olympics. These results have not proven promising enough to receive funding from our main partner, Own the Podium, which disseminates funding on behalf of Sport Canada.
Therefore, this Olympic run more so than any other I’ve been a part of, we will have to “do more with less”. Since 1998 in Nagano, Bobsleigh Canada has won at least one Olympic medal in every Games except 2002 Salt Lake City. Additionally, since 1989 the program has not failed to win at least one World Cup medal in every season (we won two silvers in the last World Cup of the year in Lillehammer this past season). That is the task for this upcoming Olympics; keep that proud culture alive despite our challenges!
I’m Lyndon Rush, the technical driving coach for Bobsleigh Canada Skeleton and product of Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Come join me on my 2025-26 Olympic season adventure as I will do my best to keep you updated through this blog on how the season is progressing.