“It’s closer to flying a plane than driving a car”, Josh Hudson on Bobsleigh and life after Rugby

How do you go, in a 6-month span, from Ivybridge Rugby Club 1XV to competing for Team GB in one of the world’s most dangerous sports?

It sounds insane, but 24-year-old Josh Hudson accomplished just that and is now an up-and-coming star in British Bobsleigh.

Bobsleigh is a sport everyone knows, but if you asked them to explain it, they’d probably say, “Isn’t that one from Cool Runnings?” or “Isn’t it just people pushing a sled down some ice?”

In reality, it’s one of the most physically and mentally demanding sports, with more nuance than it seems, and deserves much more recognition.

At 20, Josh Hudson was playing blindside flanker for Ivybridge 1XV and running his own PT business when he met the chairman of British Bobsleigh at a client’s house.

“She said she was coming to watch Ivybridge play the next weekend and asked if I’d be playing, so she came along and brought someone with her, watched me play and then mentioned me to the scouts.

“I went to a trial, and I had a few nice words from some of the Olympians who were there, and they just said, you’ve got raw power there. You’ve just got to tame it.

“The,n within eight weeks, I was in a GB race suit at the top of a track in Norway, wondering what the hell I’d got myself into!”

Hudson started his career in the sport as one of the athletes in the back of the sled called the ‘brake man’ for other pilots.

“This is a sport where the best pilots are usually anywhere between their late 20s to early 30s, which is obviously on the latter end of age wise for professional athletes. The reason is if you said to someone go and jump in a go-kart, how long is it going to take them to get from that to an F1 car?

“It’s a similar thing, but with bobsleigh, you’re putting them in an F1 car, and you’ve just got to figure it out.

“The average timescale from rookie pilot to Olympian is three or four years onwards, so when lads are kind of late teens or early 20s and showing potential in the backseat as a pusher, they’ll usually get scouted to go and do a pilots camp.”

In this sport, athletes can tie for Olympic medals to the hundredth of a second. That’s over two days and four races and covering six miles of ice.

To highlight the margin for error, Josh had me time how quickly I could start and stop a stopwatch; my best was within a tenth of a second.

Therefore, when these athletes dedicate their lives to their sport and miss out by the tiniest of margins, it can be heartbreak or elation on the grandest of scales.

Josh emphasized that, while there’s a significant physical aspect, being a driver also requires extensive technical skill.

“Most people think that even if you weren’t there driving the sled, it would still probably go down fine, but the reality is if no one was in the front driving, it would roll over in the first corner.

“It’s closer to flying a plane than it is driving a car because you’re sustaining, on average, seven to eight G’s of force, and that can spike to the mid-teens when you go into a corner.

To put that G force into perspective, if you weighed 100kg, 8 G’s of force would feel like wearing an 800kg weighted vest. That’s around the same weight as a fully grown horse.

“When you’re driving a sled, there are what’s called single, double and triple pressure corners. That means that the G force will spike at either one, two or three places depending on the length of the corner, and you only actually have control of the sled as a pilot in those specific points for maybe five to six metres.

“It’s like telling someone to drive around a hairpin corner at 100mph on ice, with control only at specific points. If you miss, you crash. And you have to do that 20 times with four guys in the back holding on for dear life.

“On some corners, depending on the difficulty, you’ve got to have Plan A, B and even C, depending on your entry into the corner because if you have a bad exit from the previous corner, you have to think on the fly and have a new plan whether you’re early or late into that next corner, it just all has a knock-on effect.

On average, Josh can have to remember anywhere between 120 to 140 steer points, all happening in under a minute, which works out to about two inputs per second to memorise.

Josh’s season started last weekend as he headed out to Norway for a training camp, after which he’ll be travelling to four different countries all before Christmas.

It’s a big season ahead for Josh, but there’s no denying it will be an exciting one with big things on the horizon for this future star of the sport.