Canadian bobsled pilot Justin Kripps a cool customer

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This article was published 21/01/2022 (1375 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Justin Kripps is the quiet eye in the hurricane.

Amid the tension and testosterone brewing at the top of a sliding track before a men’s bobsled race, the Canadian pilot exudes a calm that belies imminent explosion of muscles and speed.

“The saying ‘ice in the veins,’ that is something he embodies,” his crewman Ben Coakwell said.

“Kripps is very … it’s like in basketball. You’re doing something pretty explosive because you’re dribbling a ball and running around, but then you go to take a jump shot and there’s like a calmness. They would turn off the music in a movie when you shoot your shot.

“That’s kind of the zone we live in now.”

Kripps’ composure extends beyond the track into the management of men and sleds.

“He doesn’t deal in nervous energy. He just deals in fearlessness,” Coakwell stated.

“He has to. We push a bobsled. It’s this all-out explosive expression of sport. And then he hops in the seat and it’s like all the noise has to disappear because it is very much not like that when you’re driving a bobsled.”

Kripps credits his mother Libby — she and his father Rob were humanitarian workers for UNICEF — for giving him the building blocks of an unruffled nature.

“No matter what’s going on, she’s just voice of reason, steady and calm,” Kripps said. “I luckily inherited that.

“It’s served me super-well in a sport like this where the pressure is high, and things happen really quickly. Staying calm is a huge asset.

“That’s something that like I say, I got from my mom, but I’ve also worked on it a lot doing meditation.”

Kripps grounds the energy he and his three crewmen summon before launching from the start house.

“It’s really easy to let that just explode and go crazy and you sort of waste it in a sense,” Kripps explained. “You want to use that excitement of the big moment, but channel it into what you’re doing. If you let it get away from you, it becomes kind of anxiety and pressure.”

The 34-year-old from Summerland, B.C., piloted Canada to an Olympic gold medal in two-man bobsled with brakeman Alex Kopacz in 2018. The Canadians and Germans posted identical times to share the top of the podium in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Kripps became the second man to drive Canada to Olympic two-man gold two decades after Pierre Lueders did it in Nagano, Japan.

Kripps will attempt back-to-back titles starting Feb. 14 with the first two of four two-man runs. Men’s four-man falls on the final weekend of Beijing’s Winter Olympics on Saturday and Sunday.

What Canada could accomplish in four-man in Beijing was a motivation for Kripps to continue to Beijing in 2022, but he also wasn’t done with the process of improvement.

“After winning that medal, it wasn’t like “I’m done,” you know, “maybe I can still get better?”” he said.

“The whole sports thing for me has never been about winning a medal. The medal is kind of just a symbol that represents all of the work that I put in and where I got to.

“My career hasn’t been that of an ultra-talented athlete that was amazing the whole time. I worked on a lot of things mentally and physically.”

Kripps says he may compete beyond Beijing and eventually transition into coaching. He’s engaged to Breanne Wilson of Strathmore, Alta., with a wedding scheduled for April in California.

Canadians won four-man gold (1964) and bronze (2010). A sled that’s over a metre longer and almost 100 pounds heavier than a two-man, plus two more bodies and personalities, add to the variables.

“It’s always been a goal of mine to get that four-man success as well,” Kripps explained. “It’s a little bit more complicated. Team dynamics are more important with more people in the sled.”

Kripps, Coakwell of Moose Jaw, Sask., Ryan Sommer of White Rock, B.C., and Cam Stones of Whitby, Ont., won world championship bronze in 2019 and finished third in the overall World Cup standings both that year and in a pandemic-shortened 2020-21 season.

They finished fourth in October’s Olympic test event on the Yanqing track.

“We built an incredible team here with Cam Stones, Ben Coakwell, Ryan Summer, and we just have such good chemistry, such good seating position,” Kripps said.

Said Coakwell: “Ryan’s our firecracker, but Kripps is whatever is on the other side of that. It’s been successful for us and something that’s worked really well.

“There’s not a lot of distraction or outside noise that leaks into our four-man crew anymore. Five years ago, that might have been a different story, but now it’s just like this train that rolls and if anything’s on the rails, it just kind of gets blown out of the way.”

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Coakwell feels Beijing’s Olympic sliding track suits the strength of both crew and driver.

“it’s not an in-your-face difficult track. It’s small, minute little things that you need to do really well and that’s the kind of stuff that Kripps just dominates,” he said.

“The push portion of it is designed for our team, so we got really lucky. Not every push start is the same. Some are steep. Some are long and flat. We’re not a team that’s built for a long and flat start.

“During the week we were there, we found it really easy to push fast. We’re going to definitely put ourselves in the race from the start and hope that Kripps is whipping butt down the track too.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 21, 2022.