A British Winter Olympic hope has been training on a 40m DIY bobsleigh run built in her back garden in Consett.
Dedicated Mica McNeill, 28, will pilot Team GB’s women’s pairs bobsleigh at the Beijing Games which officially open on Friday.
Mica will be partnered at the Olympics by Montell Douglas.
Montell returns to the Chinese capital for the winter Games 14 years after competing in the 2008 summer Olympics as a 100m sprinter.
Geordie-born Mica turned to her dad Anthony when she was trapped by the pandemic and unable to reach the slopes of Europe to train for the bobsleigh event.
Anthony, who runs a building and civil engineering firm, came up with the ingenious solution of the 40m-long ‘push track’ in the garden of their home in Consett, Co Durham.
“They have been training here all summer,” he said. “We spoke about it and I said ‘we need to build something in the garden’. A friend had seen a few tracks which had been self built, and we came up with a plan.
"We then put it all together, and we got the ice runners on the bottom of the bobsleigh modified and put wheels on there instead.
“Lo and behold, we got it together and put a bungee system on there and it works really well.”
Anthony added: “It is set to the perfect height, and I have had a houseful, with Olympic athletes who are training on the push track and in our gym.
"This is all about muscle memory, every time they go down to push this, it is the exact weight they will be pushing in the Games.”
Talented Mica is in an eight-strong British bobsleigh team and competes in the two-woman event with speedy brake woman Montell.
Mica joined forces with Adelle Nicol - who also competes for Wales in shot put and is a travelling reserve for Beijing - to claim a sensational World Cup silver to show all her hard work back home had paid off.
McNeill registered Team GB’s best-ever result in women’s bobsleigh with an eighth-place finish at PyeongChang 2018. She said: “It was an absolutely incredible moment for us to have achieved our best World Cup result in an Olympic year.
“The last two years have been full of ups and downs with everything like injury and the pandemic - but this has just shown that we need to keep going and it does pay off.”
Mica achieved silver at the 2012 Youth Olympics in Austria and won gold in the 2017 Junior Bobsleigh World Championships.
“When the pandemic hit, we were 18 months to two years away from the Olympics,” she added. “We went through the summer of 2020 not being able to train, and kind of being held back from training, obviously facilities were closed.
“We have amazing sponsors in DHL and they said, ‘just go for it.’ .
"My dad and brother just put it together, which worked out absolutely amazingly.”
Mica and Montell’s first task at the Olympics will be to get through the heats. They are due to take to the bobsleigh run on February 18.
