From Durham, USA
(July 12, 2023) – For our first athlete profile of 2023 (and the 39th in the “Getting to Know…” series) we sit down with British Bobsleigh’s Brad Hall. To say the two-time Olympian had an outstanding campaign in the 2022/2023 IBSF World Cup season would be an understatement. He won a four-man shared silver medal in the 2023 IBSF World Championships, won the four-man European Championship in Altenberg, won a pile of medals across two-man and four-man, and finished the season ranked third in the tw0-man and combined, and ranked second in four-man.
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Slider: Brad Hall
Team: British Bobsleigh & Skeleton Association
Home Track: Königssee (Whistler for now)
Hometown: Crawley, Sussex, UK
We’ll kick this off like we always do: What’s your favorite track and why?
I guess it changes. Most of the time it’s the one that you do well at! I like tracks that require a bit of driving skill, so something that’s tough to master. Because when you do get it right it’s…you feel like you’ve accomplished something because you’ve managed to tame a track that’s pretty difficult. So your Lake Placids, your Whistler, Altenberg, Sigulda…
Places you’ve done pretty well at, too!
Yeah, exactly! Also, La Plagne is also a good track for me as well.
Is there something about those “driver’s tracks” where you feel you have an advantage?
I think I like when the driving comes into play a little more. Because you go to places like Innsbruck where you can gain something in the drive, but it’s very difficult. So it becomes more about the equipment and the start. So I like something that encompasses all three of those things to be the best. You can’t just be outstanding at one thing, you’ve got to have the combination of all three of them to be on the podium
Unrelated to the track, what’s your favorite town to visit on the schedule?
I’d say Königssee was/is one of them. I’m hoping it’ll be back soon…the scenery around there is always top notch, I don’t think many people are too unhappy when we see it on the schedule. The track is nice, but the scenery and to be there is just a wonderful place to be.
What is the crowd like for you there? It always felt like it was a big deal there.
Yeah, it was great! At the start you don’t have many people there watching because it was enclosed so people couldn’t get right on the sidelines there. They could get down just at the start was finishing, and them from that point on there was crowds and crowds of people. You come around the kreisel and you can smell the bratwurst and you can hear the band playing and everything. Just like any of the Germans track, then there’s a massive stand there.
I’m hopeful it’ll be on the schedule again before the next Olympics. I think the start is planning on being open so people will be able to get up there.
How did you get involved in bobsled?
I was into athletics, I did decathlon. Before that I was a rugby player as well.
There’s a lot of decathletes in bobsled, do you guys compare careers?
I don’t talk about it much myself because I wasn’t every good! I was always injured when I was doing it, and that’s one of the reasons I got out of it. I had terrible issues with shin splints and my back and that’s the main reason I looked for another sport to get into. Decathlon is ridiculously tough on your body trying to do ten events over two days. Training for that…not many people can handle the training load.
So I went to find something else and I actually started out trying skeleton! It was a part of the Talent ID program. UK Sport does these Talent IDs where they bring a lot of people in to try out for a number of sports, such as archery. They test you for different things, and they funneled me down to skeleton. I got through a few rounds of testing, got down to the last eight people, and went out to Lillehammer for about ten days. But I couldn’t keep my head off the ice! Normally people’s chins hit the ice going around the corner, but for me it was my forehead!
So they suggested I try something else. A week or so later the guy who was doing the Talent ID program said that bobsleigh was having a tryout and maybe I should check that out. And it worked out!
Your 2022/2023 season was one that British Bobsleigh hadn’t seen in quite some time (if ever), has all that you’ve accomplished this season sunk in yet?
I think it has. We always had the belief that we could get to this point. We were self-funded up until the Olympics and that was a really tough period. I was wearing a lot of different hats; I was head coach, performance director, raising the funds, logistics, I was having to do everything when the odds were really against us. But even in an Olympic season we managed to pull out a few World Cup medals and finished sixth in the Olympic Games. We just needed everything to settle down and fall into place to get there.
Last year is the first time that it all fell into place. We had a performance director and a head coach that didn’t try to change too much but allowed us to do what we’re supposed to do. And it all kind of fell into place…the starts came a bit out of nowhere. We thought it was going to be a bit of a development season in losing Nick (Gleeson) to be a pilot, but Arran Gulliver came in and we had the fastest starts in a lot of races, and a European Championship win and a second in World Championships.
It was a bit of a dream season, and just shows how far we’ve come. That silver medal at World Championships was a bit of a disappointment for us. We knew that by the fourth run we had a chance to win a gold medal, and just fell back to a joint silver instead. So that was a bit of a disappointment.
The highlight of the last year was the European championship I think. It was really special for us.
You had that hand injury a while back, how far back did that set you?
I was back in the sled in about six weeks. I think it takes about 10-12 to fully heal? But I was back in the sled after just six weeks. I wasn’t lifting any sleds, wasn’t moving anything heavy, but I was just sitting in the sled and driving a bobsleigh, and that was literally it. Then after a couple of weeks I started doing gentle pushing, then more and more afterward. It did obviously set me back a little bit, but I don’t think it was as much as people think.
What has set me back more, I’ve had ankle injuries over the past seven years now. That started a few months before I hurt my hand, and I still haven’t fully recovered from the ankle injury. They’re still a bit of a mess, and it’s a bit of a running joke with my team that I don’t actually do any training. When we get into the season I just go into survival mode: Each week we have two races and then the next week I don’t do any training, I just try to get myself back into one piece to compete again. Obviously that’s not ideal. But I’m starting to get myself into am much better place than I’ve been over the last seven years. So fingers crossed that physically I’ll be in the best shape I’ve ever been in for the years to come.
Switching gears, the night before a race what is your routine like?
We usually get together, have some dinner, and open a bottle of wine! That’s been the tradition over the last couple of years now. We just relax and just try to take it easy and enjoy what we’re doing. We’re doing sport, which is a dream job for a lot of people. A lot of people come in and take it very seriously and restrict themselves to do a lot of things…and we just like to have fun, enjoy what we’re doing. When it come down to it we’re still very serious and professional with what we’re doing but we have a couple of drinks to relax and have a bit of fun, but then down to business the next day. Bobsleigh season is stressful so you need to have time to decompress so you don’t end up resenting the sport! You have to enjoy it while you can.
I see you warming up with headphones on. What are you listening to pre-race?
It varies a lot! Some days it can be some country music, then the next day some heavy metal or rock band, then some drum and bass…it just depends on the week I’ve had, the track I’m at potentially, and what sort of things I’m focusing on. If I’m thinking a bit more about the track and how to drive some corners I might be a bit more relaxed in my warmup to nail those parts down. But if everything is falling into place it’s usually something like heavy metal or something to focus all out on the push because I know what I’m doing on the track!
We always do “favorite track”, so we’ll mix it up a bit: What’s your least-favorite curve on tour?
Yeah! Probably for the corner, it’s the 11-12 transition in Altenberg, it’s always been a bit of a pain in the ass for me! Sometimes it works and other times it’s out of control! It was like that in the first World Cup race we had in Altenberg last year. We still won, but I don’t know how, we had so much speed at that point but I made so many mistakes at the bottom but we still finished in first place.
The next week I actually managed to nail it in both runs and we won the European championships! I think hopefully I’ve put it to bed now and I’ve mastered that corner, but it’s something that’s always been tough, especially when the ice is glistening clean and the ice is fast and you’re in a four-man. You don’t see anything around there anyway.
As for my least favorite track, this is going to be very controversial, but I’ll say St. Moritz!
REALLY?! How come?!
It just…it’s boring. It’s boring. The feeling is nice when you’re running down and it’s not bumpy or it’s not loud and you just hear the wind coming past you it’s very nice. But the track is very different to drive than any other track in the world. And sometimes the track doesn’t react like it’s supposed to and it doesn’t feel like bobsleigh to me. It kind of just feels like…like kind of what people think about bobsleigh: You throw the sled down and it just gets down by itself. It feels a bit less like bobsleigh to me.
Everyone wants to argue with me when I say that, but it’s what I think!
In your career, what’s been your happiest/best moment thus far?
I would definitely have to say last season’s European Championships. It has to be the best memory for us. We knew it was going to be a very tough race, we had won the World Cup the week before, so we knew the Germans were going to up their game. Friedrich was coming back from his groin/hamstring injury, so we knew that European Champs before World Championships he was going to really up his game.
And they did, and we were only within a couple of hundredths in the first run and we knew we needed to nail it on the second run. The guys gave us a fantastic start, I drove down a big run and we walked away with a European Championship on a track that I don’t think the Germans had lost on in about fourteen years? I think finishing there…and then all the crowd…it’s a German track but they were all cheering for us and couldn’t be happier for us.
It was just a great experience. Greg (Cackett) broke early so we were a bit down the finish straight and I was starting to high five everyone down the braking straight. It was just a great experience.
You bet the Germans on their biggest home track. What did the Germans say after?
Me and Johannes (Lochner) are really close. We kind of go into a routine saying that he’s going to win the two-man and I’m going to win the four-man and that’s kind of how it was going to be. But he’s always extremely happy when we do well. He knows that we work hard and when we succeed we deserve it, and he’s there for that.
Friedrich knows what it takes to be successful and he definitely has respect for people who can finish ahead of him. He knows it’s a difficult feat to do, and when it happens it may be difficult for him to accept but he really respects it when it happens.
On the other side, what’s been your most difficult time?
The year before the Olympics we had a lot of problems that season. We had already had a few injuries that year, we had problems with COVID and had people stuck at home. Nick was out with a hamstring injury. Sam Blanchett and I were warming up and he ruptured his Achilles. So he goes out, and I had to race with Greg that day, and that wasn’t going to work out because the sled was 20kg too light because changing the brakeman. We didn’t do well, then we had to pull out of the four-man race because we didn’t have any spares. I think that was one of our lowest points.
But that season we kept picking ourselves up and moving forward. We had so much stuff that we could have just sat down and asked “Why are we doing this?” But we all had the vision of what we were trying to do and we all decided look at it like “Okay, this happened, now what do we do next?” We got on the phone to Bruce Tasker, and he was coaching the development team coming up from Innsbruck back to the UK. I asked him “Where are you?” and he goes “I’m driving back.” And I told him to turn around, get down to Königssee because he’s racing with us. He hadn’t been in a sled in like three seasons! And he just jumps in while he has this hip injury and then hobbles off. But he actually pushed pretty well and we had a great sendoff for him as well!