The Winter Olympics feature plenty of expensive, specialized gear—not only skis and hockey sticks but also less obvious accessories, like figure skating costumes that can cost $8,000. No piece of equipment, however, can blow up a balance sheet quite like a bobsled, costing upwards of $90,000 for a competitive two-man sled or $140,000 for a four-man sled, according to Marc Van Den Berg, director of technology and equipment at USA Bobsled/Skeleton, the sports’ national governing body.
That price tag doesn’t even include the cost of runners, the smooth blades affixed to the bottom of the hull that glide across the track—together, the four strips of steel run about $20,000, and each sled might travel to the Games with five sets, tailored to different ice conditions or temperatures. Then, of course, there are the thousands of dollars it takes to transport the bulky sleds around the world on freight planes or cargo ships, or across Europe in vans.
With that level of expense, the powerhouse German bobsled program—which has won a world-best 11 medals across the past two Olympics, out of a possible 21—is believed to maintain a multimillion-dollar annual budget. Most rival delegations, scraping together funding from grants, donors and perhaps a handful of corporate sponsors, can’t hope to match that kind of financial firepower.
But thanks to Van Den Berg and his partners, Team USA doesn’t have to. As the bobsled competition begins Sunday at the Milan Cortina Games, Van Den Berg says, “we have a good chance of winning medals in Italy—without spending a single dollar.”
With Advance Mfg. in Western Massachusetts, deBotech in North Carolina and industrial designer Cameron Dempster donating time, materials and machining, Van Den Berg says it would be tough to put an exact price tag on the two-man and two-woman sleds Team USA will be using at the Cortina Sliding Center next week, but he figures the cost would have to come in around $200,000 each. “And if we decided to open business tomorrow to sell to Austria or the U.K., they would easily be paying $250,000 or maybe even $500,000 to get these sleds—because they’re the best around,” Van Den Berg adds, without even factoring in the runners. “No one is building these like we do, and there’s demand for that.”
The story of the new sleds begins in 2020, when Van Den Berg was hired at USA Bobsled/Skeleton. A lifelong tinkerer with no formal engineering education but a background working for European auto racing teams, the Dutch-born Van Den Berg had been at Eurotech when the company was approached to build a bobsled for the Netherlands ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. (“I had never even heard of a bobsleigh before,” Van Den Berg says, using the sport’s official name under the International Olympic Committee.)
After those Games, Van Den Berg started making sleds for Canada, but frustrated by a lack of progress with his permanent resident card application, he and his wife, Sonja, decided to move to Italy—until Team USA swooped in and persuaded them to instead relocate to Lake Placid, the village in Upstate New York where the American bobsled program is headquartered.
Despite the United States’ success at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics, with a combined five bobsledding medals, Van Den Berg found himself joining a bare-bones program. “There wasn’t even a workshop,” he remembers. “I had to build everything from the ground up. I even built my own restroom—I was digging my own sewer to have running water.”
Van Den Berg was also unsatisfied with the equipment he had inherited, including sleds from a previous USA Bobsled/Skeleton partnership with BMW that no longer looked like the class of the sport. With little time before the 2022 Olympics, he started looking further ahead and hatched an ambitious idea: build 20 sleds himself in what he calls the Made in USA program, or M-USA (pronounced “moo-suh”). At least six of the sleds would need to be ready by the 2026 Milan Cortina Games, designed from scratch while adhering to the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation’s strict rules on things like the sleds’ length and weight.
“If you’re going to the Olympics for show jumping, you’re not going to take a pony,” says Van Den Berg, who notes that major manufacturers simply haven’t entered the niche world of bobsledding beyond occasional experiments by companies such as Ferrari and McLaren (along with the U.S.’s BMW partnership for the 2014 and 2018 Games).
Van Den Berg began working on the design with Dempster—who previously was at the North Carolina-based engineering company Corvid Technologies and in his current day job develops racecars for General Motors—and recalls that he had to host one of their early meetings in his car because his office still didn’t have heating. Meanwhile, he made his plea to two existing team partners.
Advance, a machining company that works with a wide range of clients, including defense contractors and the space program, has produced the U.S. bobsleds’ runners for two decades and, at Van Den Berg’s urging, agreed to also start manufacturing the couple of hundred metal parts that fit together in the sleds’ chassis. Advance principal David Amanti says the work—which has to be done around the busy schedule of his factory’s paying customers—amounts to millions of dollars in donations over the last three years, and “probably well over $2 million just in runners over the years.”
“Marc is always smart—he always brings a few athletes with him, and they say, ‘Yeah, I could really use a sled,’” Amanti says with a chuckle. “But we couldn’t be happier to do it. We just want to help the kids. They work so hard, and they get so little support.”
Hans deBot, president and owner of advanced composite manufacturer deBotech, has been making bobsled hulls for the U.S. since 2001 and got onboard with Van Den Berg’s bold plan for a similar reason. “It’s a sad situation, man, when your athletes have to have GoFundMe pages to be able to afford to go out and represent the United States,” says deBot, a proud patriot, who notes that a single sled body might cost $50,000 to $75,000 and that his shop has also donated around $300,000 worth of tooling. “I’m addicted to helping the athletes.”
Van Den Berg, Dempster and deBot spent close to a year perfecting the new sleds’ design, testing the shell’s aerodynamics in a computer program that simulates fluid dynamics and taking advantage of donated time at a wind tunnel typically used by auto racing teams. They also scanned the athletes’ bodies to figure out their ideal sitting positions and improve the safety of the sleds, which have the riders seated directly on the hull, without any padding, as they whip around the track at 80 or 90 miles an hour. (“When you see them after a race, they’re black and blue,” Amanti says.)
DeBot, who used to build parts for Nascar teams and these days mostly works on General Motors cars, including Cadillacs and the Chevrolet Corvette, makes the sled bodies from carbon fiber, with some proprietary materials mixed in, in a process that takes seven to ten working days. He then ships the components to Van Den Berg, who assembles the sleds with the parts from Advance, welding them together in his workshop in Lake Placid. He can further customize the sleds for each individual pilot—making the steering more or less sensitive, for instance. (Van Den Berg has also added a personal touch to the sleds: a decal of his late bulldog Wouter.)
Van Den Berg stresses that his manufacturers are overqualified for the task of building a bobsled—“We make stuff that is going to the moon or going underseas and in planes, where the tolerances are far, far tighter than these are,” Amanti says—but the result has been equipment that is the envy of all of Team USA’s competitors, including the mighty Germans. DeBot recalls one German bobsled official telling him, “Hans, I’m going back and asking for some more money—I’ve got to come up with something to compete with your sled.”
American pilot Frank Del Duca, who is competing at his second Olympics and served as the U.S.’s flag-bearer during the opening ceremony this year, says success in the sport comes down to three factors: a fast push at the top of the hill (“that’s the horsepower for the sled”) and a fast drive, but also fast equipment.
“Sleds are like racecars—they need to be constantly updated and improved upon and tested,” says Del Duca, who is fourth in the two-man standings on the World Cup circuit this season, up from tenth last year. “Now we have really cutting-edge sleds that give us the tools we need to fight for medals.”
Amanti says Advance would like to continue to support the U.S. athletes at least through the 2034 Olympics in Utah. DeBot expresses some frustration with the American federation for the lack of recognition for his efforts, but Van Den Berg hopes he can keep him in the fold because, even with 13 M-USA sleds to date, he wants to keep building.
Having mastered the two-man and two-woman sleds—and not needing to worry too much about monobob, which features one female athlete in a standardized sled—Van Den Berg might turn his attention to four-man sleds. The U.S. has traditionally been less competitive in that event, but Van Den Berg is confident in what his equipment can do.
“I don’t have to prove myself—everyone in the bobsled world knows I’m the guy to build the fastest sled,” he says. “A M-USA sled gives you the highest chance to win. It’s the difference between a gold medal and a silver medal.”