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Wednesday, April 2, 2025

T&T's bobsled men 8th, 9th and 10th in New York

On course for Win­ter Olympic qual­i­fi­ca­tion

by

Walter Alibey
1202 days ago
20211217
T&T bobsled men's team Shakeel John, from left, Thomas Harris, Shomari John, Andre Marcano and Axel Browne along with staff member Lewis Prentice is in favorable position to qualify for Olympic Games in France.

T&T bobsled men's team Shakeel John, from left, Thomas Harris, Shomari John, Andre Marcano and Axel Browne along with staff member Lewis Prentice is in favorable position to qualify for Olympic Games in France.

T&T's stroll to the Win­ter Olympic Games in the sport of bob­sled is more than pos­i­tive.

The T&T's team of Ax­el Browne, who has dual cit­i­zen­ship, broth­ers Sha­keel and Shomari John from T&T, Thomas Har­ris (Great Britain/T&T), An­dre Mar­cano (T&T) and Lewis Pren­tice who is the lone staff mem­ber per­formed with cred­it at the North Amer­i­can Cup in Lake Placide, New York ear­li­er this week, fin­ish­ing 10th, eighth and ninth re­spec­tive­ly in three dif­fer­ent races on Mon­day, Tues­day and Wednes­day.

For their fin­ish, they gained 568 points which put them with­in the top 30 teams in the world. And on Fri­day, the team's pi­lot Brown said the best thing for them to do now will be to con­tin­ue their prepa­ra­tion ahead of the com­ing year.

"We had the last race two days ago, so we're now fin­ished for the first half of the sea­son and then af­ter Christ­mas, we might have a cou­ple of train­ing events. The North Amer­i­can Cup is the cir­cuit we're on, so we had eight races and those are the races we use to gain points for the Olympics. It is a cam­paign to raise as many points as we can and to be with­in the Olympic qual­i­fi­ca­tion brack­et.

"We had three races in three days back-to-back on Mon­day, Tues­day and Wednes­day. We got a 10th place and then an eighth place and then a ninth place, so we're very hap­py with that be­cause the track we were on was a very tech­ni­cal track.

"In Park City, we did slight­ly bet­ter in sixth and sev­enth po­si­tions, the 10th, eighth and ninth were pret­ty good for us con­sid­er­ing the con­di­tions."

The team now faces an un­pre­dictable fu­ture, not know­ing what can hap­pen in the Eu­ro­pean Cup which is set to con­tin­ue through Jan­u­ary and the com­ing World Cup. To date, they're sit­ting pret­ty, know­ing that there is no room for er­ror. How­ev­er, their con­cerns are well out of their hands, Brown ex­plained.

"We can on­ly com­pare across three of the eight races and that puts us in the top 30 in the world cur­rent­ly. So we have es­sen­tial­ly points in the bank against those oth­er two cir­cuits. We're in a very good po­si­tion, we can't say for cer­tain be­cause we don't know what peo­ple will do in those oth­er cir­cuits.

"The good news is that the re­sults we have so far are good enough, we don't have to do any sup­ple­men­tal races to add to our points tal­ly. So es­sen­tial­ly now what we can do is sit and wait to see what the oth­er na­tions do and try and pre­pare for the Olympics.

Though we're not cer­tain that we're go­ing, it makes the most ath­let­ic sense to use the next six weeks to pre­pare, so if we do qual­i­fy when we get there, we can do as best as we can."

The Win­ter Olympic Games are sched­uled to take place from Feb­ru­ary 4-20 in Bei­jing, Chi­na.


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