One hour before the two-man bobsleigh heats on Tuesday, Leon Greenwood got a call. With Great Britain in eighth after the first two heats, and Taylor Lawrence feeling a bit tight, the decision was made for him to sit out the final two heats. Greenwood was being asked to make his Olympic debut with sixty minutes notice.
“Put me in any situation - I’ll thrive,” wrote Greenwood on Instagram after competing. The tone is typical of the 28 year old from Batley who transitioned to bobsleigh after an injury stopped him competing as a sprinter. Speaking to him, you realise there is nothing he doesn’t believe he can do.
“This isn’t a shock to me,” says Greenwood when asked what it is like to be at the Olympics. “I’ve worked my ass off to get to this point.
“I’ve been wanting to do this since I was 10 years old. I remember saying to my mum and grandad “I’m going to be on TV one day”.
“I’m here because I’m a competitor. I’m here because I’m prepared.”
Greenwood was a promising sprinter who reached the final of the British Indoor Athletics Championships in 2019 but a cartilage injury in his ankle left doctors telling him he would never be able to sprint at a high level again.
“Initially I had a victim mindset,” he says. “Why me? Why has this happened to me? I’ve put everything into sport. I’ve missed family events. I’ve missed holidays. And now I’ve got this injury and I can’t run again.
“Then you realise through those two, three years [of injury] that it’s not my identity. My sport, my speed, that’s not me. It made me grow as a person. I gained mental toughness. I began not comparing myself to others in a negative way but in a positive way. When you get told you can’t run again, it makes you appreciate everything else after.”
Greenwood got into bobsleigh after attending a talent identification day in 2022, but injuries once again disrupted his progress. He had to wait until November 2023 to make his bobsleigh debut. His preconceptions of the sport were shaped broadly by the film “Cool Runnings”, which tells the story of the Jamaican bobsleigh team at the 1988 Winter Olympics. He found the reality very different.
“When I first started, I did not know that I had to spend four or five months away every year. I ended up finding that out a month before I was going to go. I was a police officer at the time and I had to speak to a lot of people to see if they would give me the time off. It was very stressful.
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“The first track I went on was Winterberg. I remember speaking to some athletes who said it was one of the most dangerous tracks in the world. I thought ‘Oh my god, what have I got myself in for?’ I obviously didn’t know what to expect. I’m just in the back of the sled in the two-man going down being like “I don’t know if I like this.” I went down a few more times and the whole couple of hours after, you couldn’t speak to me. My head was spinning. But you get used to it. You get to love it.”
Winter sport has historically been dominated by white people but Great Britain’s team has become increasingly diverse since Greenwood joined. He believes that more could be done though.
“As a nation and as an organisation, we are very good at being inclusive,” he says.
“But if [ethnic minority people] can get more opportunities to do it, we’d have more people doing it. We are based in Bath. If we were based in the middle of the country, like Birmingham, you would get even more diversity.
“I’m lucky, I live down south. I used to live up north. If I lived up north, I don’t know if this opportunity would have come up.”
The positive mentality that Greenwood inhabits has him dreaming big for the Olympics, where he will compete in the four-man bobsleigh on Saturday and Sunday, even if some of his teammates are trying to stay more realistic about their chances.
“I literally say to myself most days ‘we can do this, I can do this’. I have this true belief and positive affirmation. I try to instill that into the team a little bit more. They’re quite stats driven and I’m not saying that’s the wrong thing to be like, I’m just saying this is the way I am. But having a mix is great.
“The season didn’t go the way we wanted it to because of injuries. But that’s happened now. We don’t need to worry about that. Just worry about the day because you could have a successful season, you could be winning every single race and get to the Olympics and lose.
“It’s going to be very, very difficult but I truly believe we can do it. I really do. And if we don’t, we can sit down and say we’ve done everything we can to make it happen. We can deal with that. But I’m going with – we’re going to make it happen.”
Photograph by Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo