Bobsled team seeks brakeman

Press, 27 July 1988, Page 64

Bobsled team seeks brakeman

By

TIM DUNBAR

The New Zealand bobsled team is on the recruitment trail again with its next European campaign in mind. Rhys Dacre, the track champion turned college footballer turned bobsledder, is back in Christchurch from the Olympic city of Calgary offering the lure of a free trip to Europe to the right athlete.

Essentially, a brakeman is being sought to take the place of Canterbury’s Peter Henry, who filled

that role in both the twoman and four-man sleds at the Calgary Winter Olympics. Henry is now concentrating on track. “We’re really looking for a big guy, about 14 stone, though if someone can do the job size is not always important,” Dacre said yesterday. Dacre said that the New Zealand team would this northern winter be able to contest the whole World Cup circuit — albeit on “on the skins of our butts.” This was possible because the F.1.8.T.

(International Bobsleigh and Toboganning Federation) and Fosters Lager were helping out a lot of the more impecunious bobsleigh nations. The circuit will begin with a race in Winterberg, West Germany, in the first week of November and end in Calgary on March 5. Dacre himself, a crewman in the New Zealand four-man sled which finished twenty-first in the Olympics, will be learning another skill. He is doing drivers’ school in Calgary at the end of October.

The first test for potential recruits will be a running one on the Christchurch Boys’ High School track at 2 p.m. this Sunday. The main testing, bench presses and the like, will be in a gymnasium the week-end after, Dacre being assisted by the Calgary-based New Zealand Olympic driver, Lex Peterson. Dacre said that there would be further test sessions later. “We’re doing this again and again; we hope to make it like professional football.”