Chris Avery makes a run down the course during his rookie season.
It’s been compared to rolling down the side of a hill while trapped in a metal garbage can, and even the sport’s elite admit to being so dazed they see stars afterward.
Only, nobody warned Chris Avery, BS ’15 (journalism: public relations), about that before he got into a bobsled for the first time.
“It’s a bit of an inside joke in the bobsled world,” Avery said. “They don’t tell you what to expect. It’s a rite of passage going into your first run.”
Three years after earning his diploma from the University of Oregon, Avery stepped into the bobsled chute at the Lake Placid Olympic Sports Complex as the first Team USA rookie to go down the track at the start of the 2018-19 season.
The verdict?
“It was a minute of pure chaos.”
Avery (front) leads the UO cheerleading team on the field at Autzen Stadium.
Avery hails from San Diego, where he was a linebacker and sprinter at St. Augustine High School. He enrolled at the UO because it had the blend of academics and athletics he was looking for, and after getting accepted, packed up his belongings and moved into Riley Hall. He befriended a UO cheerleader, Khrystian Clark, and while grabbing lunch in Barnhart Hall, Clark suggested Avery try out for the cheerleading team.
“It wasn’t attractive to me, because I didn’t know much about the sport side of cheerleading,” said Avery. “But, after he asked me a few more times, I said, ‘Hey, why not? I’ll try it.’ The first day I was at cheerleading practice, I fell in love with the challenge of the sports side of it. Guys were throwing these human beings up in the air, and I just saw a new challenge.”
Avery eventually became the team captain, and what began as a casual conversation over lunch turned into him traveling the country with the squad, including a trip to the Rose Bowl to cheer the Ducks to victory over Florida State University in the first-ever College Football Playoff semifinal.
“That was an amazing moment,” he said. “It was very surreal.”
While mastering cheerleading’s stunts and tricks, he was also working on a public relations degree from the School of Journalism and Communication.
“I can’t say enough about the SOJC in terms of the staff and resources that they offer,” he said. “What really stuck out to me with the SOJC was the time the staff devoted to the students. It really seemed like they cared not just about what was happening with the students then, at that moment in their college careers, but also where they were going to be after. Their mission was to get you to a place where you had the skills necessary for the real world, whether or not you wanted to use your major or knew where you wanted to go.”
That last point turned out to be important, as Avery’s public relations degree did not get much use following his graduation. He returned to San Diego and worked briefly in PR, but soon became restless. The former football player, sprinter, and cheerleader felt he wasn’t ready to retire as an athlete, and in 2018, three years after graduating, went looking for a new challenge.
So, he became a bobsledder.
He first took notice of the sport as a high school senior, when Team USA won the four-man gold medal and the two-woman bronze medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. That was the USA’s first bobsled gold since 1948, and the achievement stuck with the young Californian.
“They were at the peak of their sport,” Avery said. “I always thought of the bobsledders as these heroes.”
Avery started by researching bobsledding, and found USA Bobsled and Skeleton was holding tryouts in June in Chula Vista, California. It was time to pack up his belongings again.
“I definitely felt I had more in the tank, and more to contribute to the world,” said Avery. “I’d spent my whole life training, and wasn’t ready to give that up. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge. In my viewpoint, any challenge is fun; just give it a go and give it your all.”
At the tryout, he and other promising athletes were put through their paces. The bobsled combine consists of a 45-meter sprint, a broad jump, and a shot toss; Avery finished third among the 12 athletes at the combine, and was invited to join Team USA in Lake Placid, New York, for three additional training sessions.
The first two training sessions were held off-ice on what are known as dry-land sleds. Avery’s athletic background meant he was both quick and powerful, so he trained as a push athlete, a position every bit as literal as it sounds. As a push athlete, his job is to push the 460-pound sled to help it gain the momentum it needs to hit the first descent; once it is traveling fast enough, he leaps in the back with his teammates in a carefully practiced motion Olympic bronze medalist Chris Fogt once described as “putting 880 pounds of man into a bathtub.” From there, gravity takes over, and the sled reaches speeds approaching 90 miles per hour as it hurtles towards the finish, while only one team member— the driver—can see where they’re going while navigating the turns and banks of the course.
While Avery and his fellow trialists got used to pushing and leaping into a moving sled on solid ground, the coaches monitored their chemistry as much as they evaluated their physical aptitude. Like playing on a football team or cheerleading, a lot of your worth is determined by how much your teammates can rely on you to be where you need to be, when you need to be there.
After all, the “880 pounds of man (in) a bathtub” all have razor sharp spikes on their shoes, which can cause slashed shins if the entry isn’t executed properly, and anyone out of place in the sled can slow it down measurably—a critical error in a sport where the difference between first and fourth can be less than the blink of an eye.
“During all of these testing phases the coaches are taking notes, and they’re keeping track of your results: when you start pushing on the ice track, and how you’re doing it,” said Avery. “But when it comes down to it, the final phase is the team trial race. The pilots formulate teams, and we race during team trials. The coaches and the selection board meet, and they go over all of the statistics and the data they’ve gathered on you—and from there, they choose the US National Team."
The team trials are the third training session, where theory is turned into practice. Bobsledders hit the ice for the first time and take their sleds for a run on Lake Placid’s mile-long course, where 20 sharp turns lie between the start and the finish line.
Welcome to one minute of chaos, trapped in a sled hurtling downhill blind at a speed that would earn the athletes a hefty fine if they attempted it on I5.
“It was chaos, but it was beautiful chaos,” Avery said. “Your adrenaline spikes, and you don’t know what just happened—but you know you had fun.
“As the guy in the back, you have your head down, and as a rookie you don’t know where you are on the track or what you’re doing. You just get in the sled and hold on. No one tells you how much adrenaline you’re going to have, or how out of breath you’re going to be at the end.”
On October 26, after the team trials, USA Bobsled and Skeleton made it official: Avery was one of 11 push athletes and one of six rookies named to the 2018-19 USA Bobsled National Team.
2018-19 Team USA team photo. Avery is fifth from the left.
During his first year as a bobsledder, Avery mainly competed on the North American Cup circuit within the United States, notching three top-five finishes in a four-man sled, and an eighth-place finish in a two-man sled.
He was also an alternate for the World Cup team on four occasions, a rarity for a rookie. While he did not end up competing, he found the experience with the elite team, including a trip to Winterberg, Germany, invaluable.
“I was very fortunate as a rookie to be able to travel over to Europe,” he said. “It was a fantastic experience.”
To the casual viewer, bobsled is something of a curiosity, most closely associated with Jamaica’s 1988 Winter Olympics team that was immortalized in the film Cool Runnings. To those within the sport, though, it is a grind—there is a lot more to bobsledding than simply rolling down a hill in a garbage can.
For starters, there isn’t a support crew to help with the manual labor—the sleds are carried and maintained by the athletes themselves. Between warmups and fine-tuning each sled, hours of work are necessary before the first run of a day. Are the blades (known as “runners”) aligned properly? Are they smooth and sharp? Does the steering mechanism work correctly?
“The biggest split you’ll have between some of the top sleds is maybe two-tenths of a second,” said Avery. “So, every bit of maintenance matters.”
After several hours of work, the team hits the ice, where they have the single minute it takes them to get to the bottom of the track to identify any adjustments that need to be made.
Then the fine-tuning resumes. Again. It isn’t uncommon for sleds to only go down a course three times in a day, which means hours and hours of labor go into just three minutes of sledding.
Like everyone on Team USA, the ultimate goal for Avery is the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. As his rookie season drew to a close, Avery was realistic about the amount of work it will take to get to China three years from now.
“The number one thing I appreciate about this sport is that it’s a team sport,” he said. “I love the camaraderie that you build amongst your teammates. For the next couple of years, it’ll be about building upon that relationship and strengthening the team chemistry.
“My individual journey will be spent training, taking care of my body, and improving it enough to obviously become a good bobsledder in the next couple of years. Every year it will become more challenging, and more important to making the 2022 Winter Olympic team. That’s a whole other challenge, and a whole other obstacle in itself.”
- by Damian Foley, UO Communications
- Bobsled and cheerleading photos courtesy Chris Avery; inset photo on main page courtesy UO Cheerleaders