D12 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022
b eijing OlyMPicsBY DAVE SHEININbeijing — Marc van den Berg
was somewhere in the deserts of
Kazakhstan, or maybe it was
Mongolia, when he first got wind
of the bobsled project. It was
2008, and the Dutch sports-tech
firm he worked for was running a
20-ton semi truck in a 6,000-
mile off-road endurance race be-
tween St. Petersburg and Beijing
when an official from the Dutch
Olympic Committee rang his sat-
ellite phone and asked van den
Berg’s team if it could build a
bobsled for the Vancouver Olym-
pics two years out.
“When we finished in Beijing,”
recalled van den Berg, now the
technical and equipment lead for
USA Bobsled/Skeleton (USABS),
“I had to Google ‘bobsled,’ be-
cause I’d never seen one. I start-
ed with a blank sheet. I had no
idea.”
But it was okay, he added:
“Because I can see things.”
That is how the man now
considered perhaps the most tal-
ented builder in the world of elite
international bobsled — a mys-
terious figure of whom the word
“genius” is sometimes invoked
and whose services have sparked
transatlantic bidding wars — got
his start.
And his journey from that
starting point to Team USA was
nearly as twisting and bumpy as
that 2008 Transoriental Rally
from the shores of the Baltic Sea
to the Great Wall of China, when
his future found him via satellite
phone.
That journey took him from
Holst, Netherlands — where Eu-
rotech Sports is headquartered
and where van den Berg built his
first bobsled, helping the Dutch
team to the first World Cup
medals in its history and a
shocking 10th-place finish in
Vancouver — to Alberta, where
he relocated after Team Canada,
intrigued by van den Berg’s suc-
cess for his home country and
later success on a contract basis
for Canada itself, convinced him
to cross the Atlantic to build its
sleds full-time.
And it took him, in August
2020, from Alberta to Lake Plac-
id, N.Y., after his relationship
with the Canadians soured and
USABS swooped in and stole him
away — a move that is perhaps
the most visible manifestation of
the American program’s grand
ambitions. Because of the timing
of van den Berg’s hiring, so late
in this Olympic quad, he o nly
tweaked and tuned the Ameri-
cans’ existing fleet for Beijing.
The bigger mission, building a
new best-in-the-world fleet from
scratch, is pointed toward the
future.
“He was that one piece of the
puzzle we thought could help us
in 2026 and beyond. He’s one of
the best in the world,” said Aron
McGuire, CEO of USABS. “... If
you’re not constantly trying to
rethink and develop that sled,
the rest of the world literally just
passes you by. We don’t want to
just keep up — we want to get
ahead the rest of the world.”
From a distance, van den Berg,
50, is an unlikely figure around
whom to build an international
powerhouse in bobsled. He has
no formal education in engineer-
ing. He was a self-taught equip-
ment builder who latched on
with Eurotech Sports in 1996 —
spending the bulk of his time
working on racecars on the
Dutch and Belgian premier cir-
cuits — and quickly gained a
reputation for both his immense
skills and his brooding, solitary
style of working.
“He’s a genius,” Wim Noor-
man, Eurotech’s founder, said of
van den Berg. “His skills are on a
Formula One level. [But] he’s
such a genius, he can’t work with
others. His talent is not in com-
municating. He’s always work-
ing, always thinking about the
problem, suffering with it. Then,
he comes back three hours or
three days later with the solu-
tion.”
Noorman recalled a time in
2000, at the British GT Champi-
onship at Brands Hatch circuit,
when the gearbox on Eurotech’s
Marcos Mantis failed, sending
van den Berg into a steaming,
red-faced rage. No one could
approach him to discuss a rem-
edy. No one dared lay a hand on
the car without him. Finally, van
den Berg reappeared as if out of a
cloud of smoke and proceeded to
replace the gearbox by himself in
an hour, which the rest of theteam celebrated by breaking into
applause.
“This guy,” Noorman said, “is
an old-school, lonely cowboy.”
Van den Berg bristled at the
“genius” tag but acknowledged
he possesses God-given gifts that
he has honed through experi-
ence, trial-and-error and an insa-
tiable curiosity of how things
work. “I make a lot of stuff go
fast,” he said. “By trade, I’m a
builder.... I can make things
better. I know how to get speed. I
can see things in aerodynamics.”
When he first started working
on the Dutch bobsled in 2008,
van den Berg confronted a fun-
damental issue that went against
his training: In his racecar en-
deavors, he was always looking
for new ways to generate speed.
In bobsled, the mission was to try
to avoid its loss.
“It’s a gravity sport,” he said.
“In racing, you’ve got an engine.
You put fuel in it, so you create
something. We don’t create any-
thing [in bobsled]. We’re going
downhill. We have ice friction,air friction. I reduce the loss in
the rate of speed.”
After the Dutch team’s out-of-
nowhere success in Vancouver,
other countries began calling
Eurotech about making their
bobsleds, and by the 2014 Sochi
Games, the company was work-
ing with both the Netherlands
and Canada. By 2017, Canada had
pried him away from Eurotech
and relocated him to Calgary to
lead its sled-building operation.
In 2018 at the PyeongChang
Games, Canada’s two-man sled,
driven by Justin Kripps, won
gold for the first time in that
event, and the two-woman sled
piloted by Kaillie Humphries
took bronze.
When he decided to cut his
own runners — the sled’s metal
blades that touch the ice —
because no one else could make
them to his satisfaction, “At first,
everyone was laughing: ‘This
man is trying to cut his own
runners.’ And then we won the
gold medals for Canada with my
runners,” he said. “... Every-body’s buying runners from Ger-
many’s leftovers. But if you buy
the same runners anyone can
buy, there’s no advantage in it. I
can build a runner that’s better
than the runner you can buy or
the one you’re making.”
But van den Berg’s relation-
ship with the Canadian bobsled
federation quickly grew strained
over what he described as a lack
of communication from his supe-
riors and project-funding that
was less than promised. Cana-
dian officials, meanwhile, paint-
ed him as a mercenary whose
move to Team USA in 2020 came
down to one, age-old thing:
“He told me he left because his
paycheck is bigger... with the
U.S. program,” Chris Le Bihan,
high performance director of
Bobsled Canada Skeleton, told
Canada’s Postmedia in 2021. But
Le Bihan also acknowledged the
funding issues that frustrated
van den Berg. “It’s public money,
and it flows when it flows, and
sometimes it’s delayed, and
that’s the way it is.”Asked about hiring van den
Berg away from Canada, USABS’s
McGuire tread carefully, saying:
“I knew he was available. And
certainly his reputation was out
there.... The timing of it lined
up. I don’t know the details [of
what happened between van den
Berg and Team Canada], and I
don’t necessarily need to know.”
For Team USA, van den Berg’s
motivating principle is efficien-
cy. In Beijing, U.S. bobsledders
raced largely on BMW/Design-
works sleds built last decade at a
cost of about $250,000 each, in
part because the pieces — cowl-
ing, chassis, runners, steering
mechanisms — were built in
different places by different
firms and assembled piecemeal.
Once van den Berg’s sled-build-
ing project gets underway post-
Beijing, that will all change.
“They hired me to replace the
fleet,” van den Berg said of
USABS. “We’re going to assemble
everything, make it fit, weld — all
[in Lake Placid]. That’s never
been done. So if there is a rule
change, we can adapt quickly. In
the past, if they wanted to
change something, it took three
years. Now, we’ll be able to do it
between races. Because we build
everything ourselves. We have
materials. We own all the draw-
ings, so we have the [intellectual
property] rights. And in the end,
that’s going to make it a lot
cheaper.”
It should also make the sport
of bobsled more accessible as an
athletic pursuit. The partnership
with BMW yielded only elite
World Cup-caliber sleds. Ath-
letes on the USABS development
teams, let alone young hopefuls
just getting into the sport, have
been left to pick through hand-
me-down sleds, many of which
were in such poor shape they
were dangerous to their occu-
pants.
It is a lot of trust, funding and
expectation to place on the
shoulders of one man, but those
are the costs of global ambitions.
And van den Berg wouldn’t have
taken on the mission if he didn’t
think he could pull it off.
“I’m pretty good at what I’m
doing,” he said matter-of-factly.
“There’s no one else in the world
who can do what I do.”U.S. bobsled taps an enigmatic ‘genius’ to steer it into the futureThe United States is pinning its lofty ambitions on a mysterious figure, considered arguably the world’s top builder, to turn it into a powerhouseJONATHAN NEWTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
Marc van den Berg, 50, h as already helped the Netherlands and Canada reach new heights in bobsled.more; we have all the right pieces.... B ut I wasn’t afraid to put it all
out there.”
Then she and Love quietly left
the area. The night belonged to
two German teams that were cel-
ebrating loudly. But it also be-
longed to Elana Meyers Taylor.
And on the night she won her fifth
— and possibly last — Olympic
medal, she looked at her bronze
and thought it was as amazing as
anything she had ever won.
Humphries and her new brake-
woman, Kaysha Love, could not
see Meyers Taylor on the podium.
Instead, they were still doing in-
terviews, talking about what went
wrong.
“I didn’t drive perfectly,” said
Humphries, who finished sev-
enth. “And I think, yeah, we went
into it, and it wasn’t here. But at
the end of the day, we faced it with
as much strength and courage as
we could, and it sucks. I hoped forteammate, Kaillie Humphries,
walked quietly through the inter-
view area just a few feet away.
Humphries, who has won three
gold medals and a bronze in four
Olympics, has been a good friend
of Meyers Taylor. They were in
each other’s weddings. But that
was when Humphries still com-
peted for Canada. Now that
Humphries is representing the
United States, the relationship is
a little trickier.her fourth and final heat Saturday
night that it was probably her last
Olympic race. The realization al-
most made her want to cry.
And when it was over and she
was sure they had won bronze,
she and Hoffman leaped out of
their sled and laughed and shout-
ed and danced on the ice that
covered the surface at the end of
the track.
As they did, Meyers Taylor’s
longtime rival and new Americanney,” she said. “There’s a lot of
things in competition you can’t
control. In PyeongChang I tore
my Achilles’ right before the
event. Here, I was in isolation. So
many things happen that you
can’t control.”
She is 37 and the most decorat-
ed female bobsled racer of all
time, at least in the Olympics. It’s
hard to imagine her making an-
other Olympic run in four years.
She said she knew as she startedin amazement.
Six days before, Meyers Taylor
had sat in a sled storage container
area with U.S. driving coach Brian
Shimer and said she wasn’t sure
she could keep going with these
Games. She had been in isolation
for eight days after testing posi-
tive for the coronavirus. Her hus-
band, Nic, an alternate on the
men’s bobsled team, had tested
positive, too, and was held in a
room next door. In the room be-
side him, their son, Nico — who
also tested positive — stayed with
her father, Eddie.
She was exhausted, her mind
still foggy, uncertain how she was
going to keep racing in the mono-
bob event that ended the next day.
“You’ve got this,” s he remem-
bers him telling her. “We’re going
to do this.”
The next day, she won silver in
the monobob with a big final run.
That final monobob run re-
vived her, giving her hope for the
rest of the week. But she was still
tired, still unsure if she should be
here, worn down by the virus and
the loneliness of isolation. She
and Hoffman had practice runs,
but they weren’t good. And in the
first two runs Friday, the Ger-
mans were unstoppable.
But somehow she kept improv-
ing, putting together better and
better runs, hanging in third
place as the Germans sailed off,
until it became obvious she would
win the bronze.
“She did the damn thing,” Hoff-
man said. “She came out day by
day, run by run, and she tried to
put it together. We all encouraged
her. ‘Dude, you got this.’ It really
helped because she’s been
through a lot. She got better and
better, and then she crushed it on
race days. Both race days, I was
like, ‘Wow, this woman is on fire.’ ”
It was Meyers Taylor’s fifth
Olympic medal — her second
bronze to go with three silvers.
For years, it used to bother her
that she could never win gold. For
a time, she used to wonder if there
was something wrong with her
that she could never finish first in
a two-woman race at the Olym-
pics.
“Finally, I started to realize it
was much more about the jour-
BOBSLED FROM D1
In what was probably her Olympic finale, Meyers Taylor earns h er fifth medal
JULIAN FINNEY/GETTY IMAGES
“So many things happen that you can’t control,” said E lana Meyers Taylor, at right embracing S ylvia Hoffman after they earned a bronze medal in two-woman bobsled.