Along with skis and skates, the sled is one of the oldest means of winter locomotion. Evidence of this has been found from times long past among the Eskimos and Indians of North America who used, as they still do today, reindeer and dogs as draft animals.
Although the construction concepts were different, the purpose was one and the same: to transport people or things on snow. Thus came the skunivede in the Scandinavian countries, moved by man-push, the pulken of the Lapps, the troikas in Russia, which were pulled by horses, the toboggan; or toboga used by the Canadian Indians.
Where the sled did not have the importance of a means of locomotion in an absolute sense, they looked to it, as a recreational tool, to go pleasantly down snowy slopes. The modern sport of sledding has as its birth date Jan. 5, 1898, the day the first race was run from the Run ridge in St. Moritz to Celerina, Switzerland.
From here it spread to many winter resorts, where special slopes and even artificial hills were built, where there were no elevations, to allow the new exciting sport to be practiced. These slopes, from the development of 1500-1600 meters with an elevation gain of 9-10%, saw the first skeletons and bobsleighs, which bore little resemblance to the original snow vehicle, as their main purpose was speed.
The skeleton is a one-person sled consisting of two steel skates joined by crossbars on which a bare chest surface is placed and is ridden in a prone position, head forward and guided by simply shifting weight on it.
The bobsleigh, or more briefly bobsleigh, is a 2- or 4-passenger sled with four skids arranged two by two, the first pair of which are movable and give direction to the vehicle, which is controlled by a driver by means of two rope rods; the second pair are fixed. At the rear is arranged a brake consisting of metal teeth, which operated by a lever bites the ice hard and is used for the sole purpose of stopping the vehicle past the finish line. From the number of crew members, the bobsled is either “two-man” or “four-man.” In front sits the driver, behind the brakeman; in the four-passenger bobsled, the two center passengers seated in a row are called the interior.
In bobsled races, after the start draws, crews start one at a time and there should never be two on the track at the same time. At the start, crew members give speed to the vehicle by pushing it on foot and then quickly climbing to their seats. In official races today, each crew generally has two runs, and the sum of the times used, calculated by electronic timing to the nearest hundredth of a second, allows the compilation of the ranking.
The Cortina Bob Club is the sporting association in this discipline that holds the record for being the oldest bobsleigh club in Italy still active, as well as being the club with the most overall Italian titles (32, including 15 in two-man bobsleigh and 17 in four-man bobsleigh).
The club was founded in 1948 by Federico Terschak, Sisto Gillarduzzi, Guido Gillarduzzi, Uberto Gillarduzzi, Amedeo Angeli and Francesco de Zanna. The first president of Bob Club Cortina was Romeo Manaigo and the first secretary was Guido Fassina. The current president of the club is Gianfranco Rezzadore.
A group of athletes and true enthusiasts of a fast-paced sport that demands the utmost concentration when choosing a line—a line that has led us to the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics and the rebirth of the bobsled track in Cortina d’Ampezzo.
