Jamaican Bobsleigh Team Looks to Heat Up 2026 Winter Olympics

"We’re basically rewriting history."

Nearly 40 years after the first Jamaican bobsleigh team debuted at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, inspiring the 1994 hit movie, Cool Runnings, the team at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina, Italy, is looking to build on that foundation.

“What happened in the 1988 Games, where Jamaica competed at their first Olympics, that was like a start for the future for us, so that’s still like a motivation to us, and we take that with us every day,” pilot Shane Pitter said, according to Blavity. “It’s kind of an extra motivation to do better than the last team and the last team before; we really work hard.”

The Jamaican team consists of women’s monobob Mica Moore. Pitter, along with push athletes Andrae Dacres, Junior Harris, Tyquendo Tracey, and Joel Fearon, compete in the two-man and four-man sleds throughout the Winter Games.

Expectations are high. Last November, the team won the four-man gold at the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton North American Cup in in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. It was the country’s first gold medal at an international bobsleigh race.

“We’re basically rewriting history,” Harris said. “If you guys remember the movie quite well, what we’re doing now—the victories and the popularity that we’re getting right now, it’s basically like in the movie, and we’re just rewriting it in real life.”

The Jamaican team is still reeling from Hurricane Melissa, which occurred in October.

“A lot of people haven’t yet recovered from Hurricane Melissa, and because they’re not like recovered, that’s still a motivation for me heading into the Games to just work harder and harder and relieve some spirits that are being broken from the hurricane,” Pitter said.

They also want to show the world, once again, that a team from sunny Jamaica can excel at a winter sport.