First slide a shock to brakeman

Press, 19 April 1989, Page 34

First slide a shock to brakeman

By

TIM DUNBAR

When Dennis Trembath joined the New Zealand bobsleigh team in Calgary last October his first ride in a sled was a shock to the system. Apart from the sequence of left and right turns on the refrigerated track at Canada Olympic Park the raw, new recruit was given precious little information beforehand.

“No-one told me about keeping my head up and riding the corners,” said Trembarth on his return to Christchurch. “I had it down all the way.” When the two-man sled got to the bottom of the 1475-metre long track the big former New Zealand 19 years rugby league representative and High School Old Boys senior rugby prop was not quite the same man. “My head was spinning and stomach turning — my centre of balance had disappeared. I had to hang on to the rail.” The other New Zealanders were understanding. They gave him all of 20min to adjust and then he had to jump back in the sled for another run.

For all that Trembath, aged 24, soon showed he had the aptitude to fill the vacant job of brakeman on the New Zealand team, another Christchurch man, Peter Henry, having returned to track and field after the Calgary" Winter Olympics.

A two-man New Zealand crew of Lex Peterson (driver) and Trembath (brakeman) was formed and had a fair measure of success on the international bobsleigh circuit. They had three big races — the European championships in Winterberg, West Germany, the world championships in Cortina, Italy, and a World Cup event in Calgary — and finished among the top 25 sleds every time. “All really good results,” Trembarth said.

Peterson and Trembath were twentythird out of 46 sleds at Winterberg, twenty-second out of 38 at Cortina and twenty-fourth out of 35 at Calgary. (It should be noted that the first 18 places are almost invariably filled by the top six bobsleigh nations which each enter two or three sleds).

That finish on the New Zealanders’ “home” track in Calgary last month in the final race of the World Cup season could well have been several places higher. After three runs they were sitting eighteenth with the prospect of finishing sixteenth, only to roll on the last run. Fortunately they stayed intact and still finished.

“Wp were just unlucky, we caught a bad .piece of ice coming into a corner,” Trembarth said.

In the Calgary World Cup event New Zealand was well represented with three sleds (the full quota) in the two-man event and one in the four-man. The fourman crew, made up of Peterson, Trembarth, Darryl Fergus and Blair Telford, finished eighteenth out of 25 sleds. Trembath was too big to fit in the back of the sled and Telford did the brakeman’s job. At 108 kg (17st) and 1.96 metres (6ft sin) Trembath was the biggest and probably also the heaviest slider on the World Cup circuit.

And according to his athlete profile in the Rocky Mountain Bobsleigh Association’s newsletter the big fellow has also established a world-wide reputation for his prodigious appetite and thirst (“There are just so many beers to choose from in Germany,” he says). Trembath had already shed skg for international competition as the maximum weight for a two-man sleigh with the crew and all their equipment is 390 kg. A sled alone weighs 190 kg. Had his weight not dropped the New Zealanders would have only skg to play with and they could accumulate skg of ice.

Not surprisingly, Trembath said that the New Zealand two-man sled never had to get any weight bars on.

Bobsledders always take a battering in the course of speeding down a race track as Trembath recounted vividly. "Your knees were always bruised, your hip muscles always getting knocked about, your shoulders, your elbows. It was like going through an egg-beater, especially in Cortina.”

The Christchurch athlete said that the Cortina track was one of the most difficult in the world. “There are builtup 30 or 40ft walls and you slam down and go back the other way. You’re airborne off the ice — that’s the real excitement. It’s a real blood rush.”

There were six crashes on the first day of training for the two-man bobsleigh world championships at Cortina. “If I’d seen the sleds go down first, I don’t think I would have hopped in the sled,” Trembath admitted.

When the sleds flipped in training they made a horrific sound and there was a smell of burning fibreglass, he said. His renrark that bobsledding was a great spectator sport was not unrelated.

There was no ice on the walls of the Cortina track and there were a few damaged bodies about. “One of the Monaco guys who was wearing three sweatshirts flipped. It ripped them completely out and took a chunk of skin out of his shoulder,” Trembath said.

According to the rookie New Zealand brakeman, the average speed of sleds going down the track was 120km/h. Normally sleds slow down up to 20km/h for Kriesel curves (a 270 deg turn); at Cortina, though, it is “speed all the way.”

For novice crews training at Cortina there were five straights on which braking was permissible. When the Kiwi pair went down the first time they decided to brake only once. “We missed it because we came out of the corner so quickly,” said Trembath wryly. But they still got down in one piece.

In spite of all the bruises and scary rides the curiously-styled “nomadic labourer” is ready and eager to return to the New Zealand team’s Calgary base next October to start training for another season of bobsledding. For Trembath bobsledding offers more thrills than any other sport he has experienced. (He also has bungie jumping on his future agenda). ’Tve never had anything like it. It’s one big adrenalin rush every time you go down.” New Zealand bobsleigh funds were again short this northern winter and the European campaign had to be restricted to a two-man team of Peterson and Trembath with Telford as travelling reserve.

“The three of us were spending sCanloo (in total) on accommodation while the Canadians were spending sCanl2o per person and there were up to 15 of them,” Trembath said. “We cooked in our hotel and it was fun for a while but we just didn’t eat the right meals and ate at the wrong times.” The New Zealand team spent a long six weeks in Europe and in that time the two-man crew slid a total of 45min, a mere Bmin of that in a race.

But the team members had plenty to do off the track. “You can spend up to four hours just polishing a runner — up to just like chrome,” Trembath noted. Helped by some funding by the (lnternational Bobsleigh and Toboganning Federation) the New Zealanders bought a sled from the Americans.

With the next Olympics (at Albertville in 1992) in mind a custom-built sled will be made in Austria for Peterson and Trembath within the next two years.

The New Zealand bobsledders in Calgary continued to raise money by helping run bingo evenings and selling sweatshirts. Local Calgary businessmen and pubs also put money their way. Little financial assistance has been forthcoming from New Zealand though. Trembath obviously fitted in very well with Peterson who was New Zealand’s No. 1 bobsled driver at the Olympics. “Lex is a really easy guy to get along with and is really well liked on the circuit,” said his brakeman. “He really works hard in regards to sponsorship both in Calgary and here in New Zealand. We just haven’t cracked anything yet.”

Traditionally, drivers walk back up the track after every slide and chat to coaches from the other nations. Now that the New Zealanders are getting fairly competitive it seems a couple of the overseas coaches have started getting quiet. “We really surprised them in Calgary when we were sitting on eighteenth and it was the same in Cortina — our push times were getting right down.”

“Basically we’re classed as the top of the B nations,” Trembath says.

While the New Zealand resources are limited other nations have video cameras recording the starts of opposing sleds and have different stopwatches for each thing. According to Trembath, the East Germans had one fellow whose job was to stand by the sled and make sure nobody got near it. Talking about the atmosphere at a big race he said that all the athletes were very talkative before you slid on the ice. “Brakemen tend to talk more than drivers. Often the drivers’ eyes are closed and you ask them where they are on the track. They probably walk it four or five times beforehand to get a driveline.”

Trembath. intends to play a season of rugby league in Christchurch before returning to Calgary and being tossed around inside a sled again. A drivers’ school is planned there in January and February with interested New Zealanders invited to take part. One variation the Christchurch man is unlikely to be trying again is the frightening-sounding sport of skeleton where a driver lies on a sled and goes down an iced track head first. “I was too big ’to slide, I couldn’t control it,” he said.