Bobsleigh European champion Brad Hall: I want to be the best in the world
In an exclusive interview with Olympics.com, the bobsleigh pilot talks about his beginnings as a decathlete, why he needs both country and rock music in his warm-up, and how Great Britain can become a superpower in the sport.
Bobsleigh
Decathlon might sound like a strange sporting origin for a bobsleigh pilot, but for reigning European champion Brad Hall it provided the perfect launch pad.
Growing up, the Brit idolised fellow Crawley native Daley Thompson, who won decathlon Olympic gold at Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984.
Hall then went on to become successful in athletics in his own right, securing a decathlon national record and a top five U-23 national ranking for the discus.
But in 2011, aged 21, he decided he needed a change, and applied to a UK Sport Talent TD campaign. After initially trying skeleton, switched to bobsleigh as it was a better fit for his multidisciplinary background.
“You have to be good at so many different things in both decathlon and bobsleigh. It takes a lot of time and energy to perfect them, and I love doing a bit of everything. ” Hall told Olympics.com.
“When I came into bobsleigh, I started off as a brakeman and pretty soon after that I knew I wanted to be a pilot. So I had to learn how to push the sled, load into the sled, and drive down the track.
“You've also got to know absolutely everything about your equipment and how to set that up for different tracks and different conditions.
“There are so many different elements that come into play, and you’ve got to optimise them all. That's what I really like about the sport… as well as going ridiculously fast down an icy shoot and trying to create order out of chaos!”
Why Brad Hall listens to heavy rock and country music in his warmup
That ‘chaos’ requires pilots to be a master of all trades.
Explosive power and strength are mandatory for pushing the sled down the hill, while driving it quickly and safely requires a monk-like state of calmness and concentration.
Subsequently, Hall must ensure that he prepares his body and mind for those contrasting actions.
“After getting hyped up to push a heavy sled down a hill as fast as you can, driving requires gentle, non-aggressive movements,” Hall explained.
“You have to be able to switch between one and the other, so in my warm-up, I'm listening to some heavy rock or drum and bass music, and then the next minute is a bit of light country music or something like that. I just go with the waves of the warm-up.”
In what is an extremely attritional sport with lots of powerful movements followed by blows from the sled and the track, Hall has suffered plenty of injuries.
At the Winter Olympic Games Beijing 2022, the 32-year-old and his teammate Nick Gleeson flipped the sled on the penultimate run of the two-man event, thankfully walking away with nothing more than a few scars.
But bobsleigh usually requires endurance away from the track too.
Hall and his teammates were a self-funded outfit until last year, while their rivals Germany benefited from a seismic research and development budget.
“I had to raise the money for my own programme, do all the organisation, pick my team, do the logistics, absolutely everything behind the scenes,” he revealed.
“As a pilot, that's a massive load on my shoulders too to worry about outside of competing.”
Brad Hall: Special moment to break Germany’s domination
In order to see how much of a distraction this funding was for Hall at Team GB, one only needs to take a look at their drastic upturn in fortunes since UK Sport funding was granted after the Olympics.
Hall secured four top-three finishes from the first five two-man races in the 2022/23 Bobsleigh World Cup, and delivered two victories in the four-man sled, including Germany’s first loss in Altenberg for 17 years.
“The money made all the difference,” Hall said. “We've got a new head coach and a new performance director, which has taken all that stress away from me, meaning we could just focus on pushing as fast as possible, driving as well as we can, and taking on the rest of the world.”
In January, the four-man team including Taylor Lawrence, Greg Cackett and Arran Gulliver then secured a third victory of the season to become Great Britain's first-ever European bobsleigh champions.
In doing so, they beat legendary pilot and four-time Olympic gold medallist Francesco Friedrich on his home track for a second-consecutive event.
“We've had so many second-place medals behind Francesco Friedrich, and you could see what a special moment it was for us to be the first ones to break through Germany’s domination… we were already celebrating down the breaking straight,” Hall said.
“After winning a few gold medals and winning the European Championships, it's now just about having that belief to keep pushing forward, and to know that we can be at the top.” - Brad hall to Olympics.com
That victory propelled the team into the British sporting mainstream, with Prince William penning a public letter of congratulations to Hall and his men on social media.
A month later at the 2023 World Championships in St. Moritz, Friedrich edged another thrilling encounter between the rivals, while Hall and his team delivered an impressive silver - Britain’s first four-man bobsleigh world championships medal in 84 years.
Why Brad Hall never gave up on bobsleigh
While Team GB’s bobsleigh fortunes have certainly turned a corner - in every sense of the word - Hall deserves special credit for never giving up through ‘the chaos’.
For the best part of a decade, he competed without financial support or tangible results to reward his exertions in such a physically demanding sport.
“There's been a lot of times where I've thought about quitting over the last a number of years,” he said.
“I had a lot of injuries which have caused me a lot of pain when competing at such a high level.
_“_But I love the sport and the adrenaline, and the excitement that you get from bobsleigh is like nothing else. I want to be the best in the world and that's what drives me to keep going.
“I'm a very determined person and when I set my mind to something, I’m in 100%. I know that there's still so much that I've got to give, even after one of our best seasons yet, and it is exciting to think that we're not the finished product yet.”
Brad Hall: Grand ambitions for Milano-Cortina 2026
Hall is aiming to be the finished product by the time of the Winter Olympic Games Milano-Cortina 2026.
Great Britain’s only Olympic gold medal in bobsleigh to date came back in 1964, when Tony Nash and Robin Dixon combined to shock the two-man field in Innsbruck.
Under Hall, the team has a very good chance of becoming their nation's second Olympic champions, but there are still many hurdles to keep them grounded.
“At the moment we don't have a huge amount of funding for bobsleigh in the UK, and most of it is directed towards my team, so we need more help to help develop the younger pilots and the next generation coming through,” Hall said.
“Hopefully over the next few years we can show that the Federation is doing a good job and gradually release more funds.”
“I've competed with John Jackson who was our last British Olympic medallist, and Sean Olsson, who won bronze back in ‘98 in Nagano, so it would be great to emulate some of that success and to bring home more more medals for Great Britain, and hopefully not just in the two, but in the four-man as well.”
There also remains the problem of beating Germany, with Friedrich determined to win his third-consecutive Olympic titles in the two and four-man.
That battle remains a test not only of who has the superior driving skill, but also who commands the better equipment.
Fix that, and we could be in for one of the most competitive men’s Olympic bobsleigh competitions for a long time.
“We've got lots of plans over the next few years to try and catch up with their technology and to minimise that advantage. There's no other country that's making like their own sleds or anything at the moment apart from the German Federation.
“But we are only at the start of the Olympic cycle, and I would like to think that by the time we get to the Olympics in 2026 that we will be the ones to beat."