KEATON BRUGGELING
Sport: Bobsleigh
Event: Four-Man
Age: 27
Hometown: St. Catharines
Residence: Hamilton
Local Club: CANAM Strength & Conditioning
First Olympics
Instagram: @keatonbruggs
JAY DEARBORN
Sport: Bobsleigh
Event: Two-Man & Four-Man
Age: 31
Hometown: Yarker
Residence: Whistler
Local Club: CANAM Strength & Conditioning
Second Olympics
Instagram: @j.dearborn
MIKE EVELYN O’HIGGINS
Sport: Bobsleigh
Event: Two-Man & Four-Man
Age: 32
Hometown: Kanata
Residence: Ottawa
Local Club: CANAM Strength & Conditioning / CrossFit 1855
Second Olympics
Instagram: @mike.eve.ohiggs
VIEW BOBSLED COMPETITION SCHEDULE HERE.
By Keiran Gorsky
There is an impossible quiet as you hurtle down a bobsled track. Not the sled, mind you, that scrapes and screeches over the ice, gradually sucking you to the floor of the contraption as it picks up speed. Quiet is the scattered crowd that strains to be heard above it all.
It is this eerie silence that gets to pilot and former Carleton University Ravens football player Jay Dearborn, who played three seasons in the CFL before his bobsled days. Dearborn used to thrive on the cheers and jeers of a raucous crowd.
“As a football player in a big stadium, you can kind of lean on the home crowd to get you excited and get you going,” Dearborn recalled. “It’s different… I’ve learned to find that energy elsewhere, a little bit more internally.”
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In a Winter Games dominated by athletes who learned their sport before they learned to walk, bobsled is something of a strange beast. The Canadian men’s team is composed almost entirely of athletes who had never been in a bobsled until well into their 20s.
Dearborn is one of three bobsledders with Ottawa roots in the sport who are heading to Cortina d’Ampezzo in February. The former Saskatchewan Roughrider is joined by two more athletic transplants in former Nepean Raiders/Ottawa Jr. Senators hockey player Mike Evelyn O’Higgins and Ravens football product Keaton Bruggeling, a past Ottawa Redblack and current Hamilton Tiger-Cat.
Olympic hopefuls are often discovered at talent identification programs like RBC Training Ground, where young athletes can demonstrate their raw attributes in isolated tests of speed, strength, power and endurance. Physical competencies can then be mapped onto the skill sets required for later-entry sports, like bobsled and rowing.
In a sport where the initial push-off is just as important as the subsequent descent, the explosive speed and upper-body strength of football players come in handy. The pure pace of track-and-field and the mandatory endurance of hockey also tend to overlap. Everyone brings something to the table.
“I like to think of it (bobsled) as a great melting pot,” described Evelyn O’Higgins, who was also part of Canada’s bobsleigh team in Beijing 2022. “I think it’s kind of emblematic of Canada to have this sport where everyone comes together.
“If you have the raw tools of speed and power and cold weather resistance and, I’ll say, high tolerance for pain and suffering, then you can be a good bobsledder.”
Read More: Ottawa’s Mike Evelyn trades his hockey blades for longer blades on the Canadian bobsleigh team
That also means everyone had time to develop life plans before Olympic dreams ever entered their heads. Ottawa’s contingent all have day jobs outside of bobsled. The split is most pronounced for Bruggeling, who misses the first chunk of bobsled preseason at the tail end of the CFL season.
It isn’t a simple matter of hopping into a sled in the winter – both sports call for distinct physical profiles. The 27-year-old has to put on some weight come late October to be ready to heave the massive 460-pound sled in November.
“Bobsleigh is not an easy sport on your body,” signalled Bruggeling, a wide receiver come summer.
Dearborn and Evelyn O’Higgins don’t have competing athletic seasons to worry about, though their shared background in engineering brings its own set of challenges. Both of them lead double lives in their professions at Ottawa-area firms.
Their national teammates Yohan Eskrick-Parkinson and Luka Stoikos also majored in neuroscience and architecture. It can be a gift to have so many creative thinkers on the team, though, at times, it becomes a little too tempting to splice their worlds together.
An inordinate amount of time can be invested in unknowable minutiae. Maybe things would have turned out different if only they had turned differently past that corner of the track. When every hundredth of a second matters, you can find yourself losing sight of the big picture.
“It’s great because it’s cool to have like-minded people around you who are kind of interested in the physics of the sport and how this all works and how to optimize our efficiency,” Dearborn highlighted. “But at the same time, you can get down a rabbit hole pretty quickly.”
Evelyn O’Higgins, who has ADHD and spoke about how he excels whenever he’s busiest in an RBC Spotlight interview with CBC Sports, agreed with Dearborn’s assessment of the sport.
“[Bobsled] can be complicated when you try to put it all together, but it’s governed by simple principles,” explained the All Saints Catholic High School and Dalhousie University grad. “So it’s nice to think you can fully understand it, but there’s a lot of, I’ll call it sled science, that gets misunderstood and cannot be fully understood.
“So it’s a little bit helpful, but too much can be paralyzing. It’s about understanding where that sweet spot is.”
Improbable Ottawa bobsled roots
Dearborn, Evelyn O’Higgins and Bruggeling all found their way into the sport at CANAM Strength and Conditioning, which is co-owned by former Team USA Olympic bobsledder Adam Blandford.
Read More: Homemade CANAM cart has helped Ottawa become an improbable bobsled athlete factory
“I’m super proud of them. They’ve worked really hard and they’ve earned what they’ve gotten,” underlined Blandford, noting that they are a down-to-earth and kind-hearted crew who belie their imposing physiques.
“Those guys have really battled through a lot of adversity,” he adds. “The state of the program coming out of the last Olympics was really challenging. This season, for the World Cup guys, the team fees were $30,000 – so they paid out of pocket $30,000 to represent Canada. And that is not including lost wages and everything else that costs money while you’re in Europe.
“These guys really have a lot of love for the sport and for their country, and clearly, really value the opportunity to represent Canada at the Olympics.”
Dearborn, for one, sports a Township of Stone Mills logo on his Canadian kit to recognize the contributions of individuals and businesses from his tiny hometown of Yarker (northwest of Kingston).
In his hour of need, small business owners and nonprofits came to help. The owner of Mike’s Pizza, a family-run pizzeria in Sydenham where Dearborn attended high school, helped organize a series of fundraisers throughout the summer.
Dearborn isn’t sure whether crowdfunding campaigns will be sustainable in the long-term. Their help means everything, he maintained, but in the midst of economic uncertainty, it should hardly be expected. As it so often is in elite amateur sport, future sources of funding remain uncertain.
“It’s tough when you go to your small community, right? You know they’re facing economic struggles as well,” Dearborn outlined. “And I think that’s what makes it so special, in them supporting me.”
Dearborn, Evelyn O’Higgins and Bruggeling, of course, are all well acquainted with uncertainty. The Olympics were never on the radar until they very suddenly were. Athletes at this level are often asked to spare a few words of wisdom for youngsters. Bruggeling, instead, had a message for everyone else.
“I wasn’t a prospective Olympian until two years ago,” offered the 27-year-old from St. Catharines. “It is not too late. It is never too late to start and to try something new. This is one of those unique sports where you can join. It’s not hyper skill based. You won’t run into a lot of barriers and hurdles on your way. It’s a lovely sport for that. And it brings all kinds of people together.”
Blandford echoes that message, and adds an invitation. The Ontario Bobsleigh Skeleton Association will be hosting pilot schools and push camps throughout March in Lake Placid, N.Y. and interested athletes can get in touch via contacts on the OSBA’s website.
While the national program has been an expensive endeavour recently, the OSBA wants to make it cheap or free for bobsledders to develop with the provincial association, indicated the OBSA’s the high-performance director.
“Now is the time for the next generation of great Canadian sliders to start in the sport, at the beginning of the (Olympic) quad(rennial),” enthused Blandford, who’s hoping new recruits will get to learn from veteran Team Canada pilot Pat Norton, who narrowly missed the cut for the 2026 Games.
Read More: The heart of the Canadian bobsled team Pat Norton left to watch Olympics from home
Ottawa coach dreams of 3 local Olympians sliding together
The Milano Cortina Olympics will be the first time this season that Bruggeling, Dearborn and Evelyn O’Higgins all race in the same international event.
Evelyn O’Higgins has been competing in Europe in World Cups, Dearborn has only raced on the North American Cup circuit, and Bruggeling has been on both sides of the pond.
Piloted by Taylor Austin, Canada’s top sled cracked the top-10 in the World Cup four-man standings, while Dearborn won one gold, four silver and seven bronze medals in 14 North American Cup races.
Blandford knows his athletes will be in top form for the Games.
Dearborn “obliterated” the Canadian push record for a pilot at the Calgary Ice House this season, Evelyn O’Higgins has been “the fastest breakman we have in the program” for about five years, and Bruggeling has “really hit his stride” coming off his CFL season.
Since Bruggeling joined Evelyn O’Higgins and Toronto’s Shaquille Murray-Lawrence on the World Cup circuit in the new year, the crew recorded top-6 push-start times in five of six heats with Austin, who earned Canada’s best result of the season (sixth) in their last World Cup race in Altenburg, Germany.
Now that Dearborn has been promoted in advance of the big show, Blandford wonders if he may get a shot to see what he can do with the top pushers at Canada’s pre-Olympic staging camp.
“From a push standpoint, you’ve got what could be the fastest pushing pilot in the world and one of the fastest crews in the world if you put them all together,” Blandford pitched. “If there’s any chance they all end up on the same sled, that would be the icing on the cake for me, to see them slide together at the Olympics.”
Blandford has been “super impressed” with Dearborn’s progression as a pilot since he jumped into the driver’s seat after pushing his way onto the 2022 Olympic team and placing 23rd aboard Austin’s sled.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the Canadians need to have the fastest push, which is something we haven’t seen out of Canada in a really long time,” Blandford indicated. “We’re a long-shot at the Olympics. The Canadians are definitely the underdogs going in there, and I don’t think anybody expects us to be on the podium.
“But that’s why you compete. I think we’ve got a real opportunity to surprise some folks.”
– with files from Dan Plouffe
OLYMPIC MEN’S BOBSLEIGH COMPETITION SCHEDULE:
Add the full men’s bobsleigh schedule to your calendar on this page.
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