T&T end­ed in the 28th spot in the two-man bob­sleigh event at the Bei­jing Win­ter Olympic Games in Chi­na on Tues­day.

The lo­cal team's plac­ing saw them miss out on a chance of com­pet­ing in heat four, the medal round, as on­ly the top 20 ac­cu­mu­lat­ed times/na­tions ad­vanced to the fi­nal slide.

For their fi­nal run at the Yan­qing Na­tion­al Slid­ing Cen­tre in Bei­jing, T&T’s pi­lot Ax­el Brown and new brake­man Sha­keel John, who re­placed an in­jured An­dre Mar­cano, the brake­man for the open­ing heat on Mon­day, clocked their sec­ond-fastest time of one minute and 00.86 sec­onds (1:00.86) in heat three for an ac­cu­mu­lat­ed time of 3:02.56.

T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee (TTOC) pres­i­dent Bri­an Lewis, who wit­nessed the team in ac­tion in Bei­jing was pleased with the ef­fort of the team at the Games.

He said, "The team qual­i­fied for the Bei­jing Olympic Games in 29th. The top 30 in the world were at the Olympic Games and TeamT­TO end­ed up 28th and that has to be put in­to con­text. While it's a gen­er­al dis­ap­point­ment by the guys that the ob­jec­tive of get­ting in­to the top 20 was not achieved there is a lot over the course of the two days for them to be en­cour­aged by and be op­ti­mistic.

"They were proud of the ef­fort they had put out. There were var­i­ous chal­lenges two years ago, a year ago, I didn't think the bob­sled world would have even fac­tored in T&T. The odds of T&T ap­pear­ing in the qual­i­fy­ing for the Win­ter Olympics so you have to ac­knowl­edge that ef­fort by the group es­pe­cial­ly Ax­el Brown who would have, not just be­ing the pi­lot, but he would have made all ef­forts and ex­tend­ed all ef­forts to first off get his T&T pass­port and to have the team cam­paign­ing in a short space of time in an ef­fort to qual­i­fy which may have been a long short when it was first con­cep­tu­alised but the in­di­vid­ual and col­lec­tive de­ter­mi­na­tion of the group, you have re­spect and ac­knowl­edge that and the per­for­mance here was cred­itable. They weren't dis­graced or di­min­ished by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion based on the en­cour­ag­ing com­ments," said Lewis.

"It even had the IOC pres­i­dent Thomas Bach com­ing to the bob­sleigh event and he had very en­cour­ag­ing words at the fact that T&T, TeamT­TO, had qual­i­fied for the Bei­jing Win­ter Olympic Games. It speaks to the IOC's com­mit­ment al­so to uni­ver­sal­i­ty."

On Mon­day in the open­ing slide, pi­lot Brown and Mar­cano fin­ished in a time of 1:00.81 and re­turned with a 1:00.89 in the sec­ond slide for a com­bined time of 2:01.70 to be in the 27th spot, head­ing in­to the fi­nal day. Though, faster than its pre­vi­ous slide, the heat three-time saw them slip one spot to fin­ish 28th ahead of Brazil (3:03.81) and Ja­maica (3:04.12) in the 30-na­tion com­pe­ti­tion.

Ger­many swept the top three places. Pi­lot Francesco Friedrich and brake­man Thorsten Mar­gis re­peat­ed as cham­pi­on. This time around sole­ly af­ter ty­ing for gold with Cana­da (Justin Kripps) at the pre­vi­ous Games in 2018.

Friedrich and Mar­gis broke their own track and start records which they had achieved the day be­fore in the two open­ing heats. In the third heat, the pair clocked 58.99 to bet­ter their pre­vi­ous track time of 59.02 (heat one) and their start time of 4.93, pre­vi­ous­ly 4.94 (heat two) to ac­cu­mu­late an over­all time of 2:57.37 to lead the 20 qual­i­fy­ing na­tions for heat four, the medal race.

Friedrich and Thorsten Mar­gis clocked 59.52 in their fi­nal slide to end with a time of 3:56.89 to nab gold. Cop­ping sil­ver was Ger­many’s oth­er team of Jo­hannes Lochn­er and Flo­ri­an Bauer with an ac­cu­mu­lat­ed time of 3:57.38 and in the bronze medal­list were the duo of Christoph Hafer and Matthias Som­mer with 3:58.58.

Lochn­er and Flo­ri­an Bauer sat in sec­ond place af­ter the open­ing slides with 1:58.53

"When you look at the teams that they were up against, big guns of world bob­sled to­day (Tues­day), day two, was a bit of a chal­lenge in that An­dre Mar­cano was coura­geous in day one bat­tling with a very se­ri­ous in­jury, as­sessed to be a pos­si­ble rup­tured ten­don in his left knee so that to­day Sha­keel John was asked to step up and af­ter Chef de Mis­sion Lovie San­tana was able to com­plete the nec­es­sary med­ical re­ports and doc­u­men­ta­tion, the Bei­jing or­gan­is­ing com­mit­tee, the IOC (In­ter­na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tee) and in­ter­na­tion­al fed­er­a­tion ap­proved the re­place­ment of An­dre Mar­cano by Sha­keel John which as chal­leng­ing as the cir­cum­stance would have been Sha­keel John made his Olympic de­but in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances and ac­quit­ted him­self ad­mirably when one con­sid­ers that Sha­keel is 22, Ax­el Brown is 29, the oth­er John broth­er Shomari is 26 and we have An­dre Mar­cano and Mikel Thomas who are in their 30s.

"There is some op­ti­mism as they look down the road with an eye on Courtina Mi­lan in 2026 (Italy)."

Lewis went on to add that it is go­ing to be im­por­tant for every­one, es­pe­cial­ly the ath­letes, their team sup­port Lee John­ston and coach Tom Har­ris, to look at the im­me­di­ate fu­ture and ba­si­cal­ly clar­i­fy how they want to pro­ceed.

"It is ob­vi­ous that based on the com­ments of some of the in­ter­na­tion­al bob­sled ex­perts here, the team has po­ten­tial, it's just a mat­ter of hav­ing the struc­ture and then the nec­es­sary spon­sors etc go­ing for­ward and in bob­sled, like a num­ber of sports at elite and Olympic lev­el it's an ex­pen­sive sport in terms of the tech­nol­o­gy, the re­sources, etc but in all TeamT­TO bob­sleigh af­ter a hia­tus of 20 years made a re­turn to the Win­ter Olympic stage and the guys were all en­cour­aged," said Lewis.

"The im­por­tant thing from here on in is for the group to de­brief, as­sess where they are and as­sess what were their strength and weak­ness­es, what were the learn­ings and to make de­ci­sions as to how to move for­ward.

"My hope that they would al­so em­brace the in­put of the fa­ther of T&T bob­sleigh Gre­go­ry Sun, in terms of his from afar giv­en his knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence , his analy­sis and his as­sess­ment of the guys' per­for­mance here in Bei­jing Win­ter Olympics but all in all en­cour­ag­ing and I hope that the ath­letes are en­cour­aged and mo­ti­vat­ed to stick with the Games and the com­mit­ment to the TeamT­TO bob­sleigh pro­gramme."