It's been 33 years since Jamaica debuted its four-man bobsled team in the Winter Olympic Games and the tropical island nation is hoping to qualify again — with the helping hands of a Queensland physiotherapist and performance coach.
Jo Brown says if the team qualifies for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, it will be "a re-run of Cool Runnings" — the 1993 hit movie about Jamaica's original bobsled team.
"The original coach in the movie was played by [the late] John Candy, his name's Pat Brown," Ms Brown said.
"He's now still the driving coach today and he's come back in for this season to coach the drivers, and the other coach [Wayne Thomas] was in the last [Jamaican] team to go and represent the four-man.
How do you score a job with the Jamaican bobsled team?
Ms Brown has been based on the Sunshine Coast since 2003 after moving to Australia from New Zealand in 2001.
During that time she has worked with Swimming Australia, Tennis Australia, Netball Australia, the Australian Winter Olympics speed skaters and the Paralympic ski team, the USA ski team, Tongan Rugby Sevens and, more recently, Jamaican Olympians Elaine Thompson-Herah and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
Her relationship with the Jamaican athletes began at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.
She had applied to be part of the volunteer workforce and was one of 20 physiotherapists selected from 4,000 to work with a team.
Ms Brown said her time spent with the team at the Gold Coast was life-changing and led to trips to Jamaica to share her skills with local physiotherapists, attend World Championship events and meet various athletes.
One of those athletes was Christian Stokes — the brakeman on the original bobsled team and current president of the Jamaican Bobsleigh Federation — who asked if she would work with the current bobsled team as they aimed for the Beijing games.
She spent 18 months working with the team remotely, which included screening and treating conditions via video calls, but recently left Australia to join them at Whistler, in Canada, where they are based at the athletes' village from the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Jamaica's four-man team will compete in three qualifying events before Christmas, with the hope of securing enough points at those events to qualify for the Games.
If not, a final qualifying round will be held in Europe in January.
If they score enough points, it will be a big deal.
Aside from their debut in the sport in 1988 when the team crashed and never officially finished the event, Jamaica entered a four-man bobsled team in the 1992, 1994 and 1998 Winter Olympics finishing 25th, 14th and 21st respectively.
Injuries part of the sport
Ms Brown is overseeing 11 male and female athletes while working alongside coaches Pat Brown and Wayne Thomas.
She works seven days a week, covering daily gym sessions, sliding training, injury prevention and treatment and safety monitoring.
The sled weighs hundreds of kilograms, travels at more than 130 kilometres per hour down an icy chute and clocks up "four to five Gs" on some corners.
Succeeding in the sport requires a combination of strength, power and agility.
"Gravity is taking them and they're pushing it [from a stopped start] and it's sliding, so they have to have the leg speed to be able to get going but they need to have the strength to be able to push — and if they don't have the endurance to keep the length going long enough, they're not going to make it in the sled," Ms Brown explained.
She said the tension the athletes applied to their bodies to prevent them from being flung out was "full on" but their passion and love of the sport outweighed the fear of being injured.
Ms Brown said with that determination and their sense of belonging in the sport, anything was possible.
"There's no, 'Oh, what are Jamaica doing here?' The fact that they've kept showing up … there's a lot of respect from a lot of the other athletes," she said.
"There's no feeling of them being the underdog … there's just this feeling of, 'You guys deserve to be here just as much as everyone else'.
