Origins
What puzzled him more was the fact that one of the crew, Terry McHugh, was a good friend who he had always thought to have been of reasonably sound mind. "To be honest, I sat there watching Terry and I said to myself, "What is he doing? Has he gone completely mad?, it just looked absolutely unbelievable."
Six years on and guess who was sharing a two-man sled with McHugh, hurtling down a Japanese track, at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour?. "It makes perfectly good sense once you're there. Honest," insists Pamplin, one member of the six-man Irish bobsleigh team that was in Nagano for this year's Winter Olympic Games. Pamplin and McHugh teamed up in Ireland I and Peter Donohoe partnered Simon Linscheid in Ireland II in the two-man competition. The four man team was made up of McHugh, Gary Power, Linscheid and Pamplin. Nessan O' Carroll was also part of the team.
The six members of the team came to bobsleighing from a variety of
sporting backgrounds - McHugh competed in three summer Olympic Games in the
javelin and Power, who was also in the bobsleigh team in 1992, began his
sporting life as an international discus thrower. Donohoe represented Ireland in
the 110 metres hurdles, Linscheid in the hammer event and Pamplin, who is also a
former youth international footballer, in the 100 metres, where he had a
personal best of 10.7 seconds. O'Carroll's background is in martial arts. Most
of the current team was encouraged to get involved in the sport by McHugh, who
first took up bobsleighing 12 years ago.
"I'd known Terry for years and when I heard rumours in 1996 that they were getting a new team together I contacted him and he just said `come along'. I just love sport in general and I fancied trying something new," says Pamplin. "So we went off to a bob school in Innsbruck where we all learnt to drive - and we just took it from there. We finally qualified for the Olympics through the Americas Cup circuit last year." Linscheid tells a similar story. "I knew three members of the team in '92, because some of them were athletes like Terry, Malachy Sheridan and John Farrelly. I had wanted to get involved but then the programme was disbanded and we didn't have a team at the last Games in France in '94. Then the Olympic Council wanted to start a new programme and they came to me and asked me to get involved.
The refusal of the Minister for Sport, Dr McDaid, to make funding available for the team on the advice of the Irish Sports Council almost scuppered their hopes of going to Japan, but the Olympic Council of Ireland came to the rescue, just days before they were scheduled to leave, when they announced they would use monies designated for Sydney 2000 to fund the participation of the team, which also included skier Patrick Schwarzacher-Joyce. "To have the Sports Council say that they weren't going to fund winter sports was very frustrating, to say the least," says McHugh. "I would like to think we would be measured on our merits and I would have thought that when you achieve Olympic qualification, regardless of the sport, you should be taken seriously. We have to give full credit to Pat Hickey (president of the OCI) - without his support this probably wouldn't have happened.
"We were in Innsbruck when we heard Mr Treacy (John, head of the Irish Sports Council) say he wouldn't be asking for support for us. We were all very disappointed but hopefully those attitudes will change - it's going to be difficult for us but I think we will change them. Eddie Jordan had to start somewhere and people laughed at him - look at him now. There's no reason why that can't be us soon. "People here have been a bit cynical towards what we've done, there is some begrudgery. Compare that to the Swiss or the Americans - they can't believe how little support we get. They are supported so well in everything they do, there's no cynicism, no begrudgery, you just do the sport you choose and that's it."
One source of enormous help to the Irish team has been three-time bobsleigh Olympian Albert Grimaldi, better known to non-bobsleighers as Prince Albert of Monaco. Having already had to rent the two-man sleds they used in Nagano, the Irish still needed to find a four-man sled, which Prince Albert duly supplied. "He is tremendously helpful, he always has been to us," said McHugh. "Maybe it's because he's got a lot of Irish in him and he understands what it's like to be a small nation with unfavourable climatic conditions. "Without him we wouldn't have driven four-man in the Olympics, so that says a lot," said Pamplin. "He has been great to us and has fully supported us in everything we've done and want to do."
The bobsleigh events took place at the unique `Spiral', the first artificial ice track to be constructed in Asia. Located in the foothills of Mount Iizuna in the Asakawa district in the northern part of Nagano City, the 1,700 metres-long track, with 15 bends and a 113-metre drop from top to bottom, is the only one in the world with two uphill sections. The environmentally-conscious Japanese were anxious to avoid making any unnecessary changes to the landscape in the 18-hectare site and asked the track's designer, German Ralf Mende, to follow the natural contours of the mountain on which it is built.