(July 5, 2021) – For our sixth athlete profile of 2021 (and the 28th in the “Getting to Know…” series) we catch up with USA Bobsled & Skeleton’s Josh Williamson. Josh, a former lacrosse player, came to the team from season one of Team USA’s “Next Olympic Hopeful”, and in his now four-year sliding career has racked up piles of North American Cup medals, as well as a World Cup bronze medal on back of Hunter Church’s sled. This coming season he will be gunning for his first appearance in the Olympics.
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Slider: Josh Williamson
Team: USA Bobsled & Skeleton
Home track: Lake Placid
Hometown: Sanford, Florida, USA
We do this every week, and today’s no exception: What’s your favorite track on tour and why?
I find this pretty easy! I know it’s going to be a weird answer to some people but I absolutely love Lake Placid. I know it’s a rough track, but I think home track advantage is great and everyone loves to win, and that’s one of our best tracks for that. We slide it year-round, and I love the character it’s given. Sometimes people are hesitant to come out and slide Lake Placid, but that’s something that I think is great for us to lean into, and I love that our home track is a track that is sometimes feared by people. I think it’s a cool thing we get to do, and I think it’s a blessing that we have all of these facilities here and can spend so much time on that track. I also think it really prepares some of our new athletes, you slide somewhere like Lake Placid then you go somewhere else and think “Wow, is this what the sport is really like?!” You get used to Lake Placid and bump around a bunch then go to another track and feel like the sport’s a lot smoother!
On a run down the track, at what point do you know a run is going good or bad? Is there a certain point?
It definitely depends on the pilot! You get used to how different pilots drive and how they take different lines. I have a big focus of mine, especially in four-man at the two spot, I try to feel like I’m going with the sled. I’m not leaning too hard or anything but I can think “Okay, we’re in curve 2, then curve 3…”, and I can generally tell how it feels. Hunter [Church] would come to us and ask us “What did that run feel like?” and that’s something that he as a pilot likes to get feedback on and see if there’s something we felt that he didn’t. Generally my feedback is that my timing is off somewhere, but that’s how I can tell maybe we were off. Maybe we’re having a rough “Highway” today in Placid, do I feel like I can go with the sled or am I a little bit off and that tells me that the sled is maybe a hair early or late into the turn. Like if I’m hitting my head on the sled then either we’re having a bad run or I’ve messed up somewhere. The better I’ve gotten, the less I’ve messed up though, I’ve been able to memorize what curves are supposed to feel like. I think especially with marquee curves at specific tracks, you get a feel for them. In Altenberg, for instance, if you feel a fourth pressure through Kreisel you know something bad is about to happen! It’s kind of like, you get the feel of a Thunderbird or a Shady or something and you know what that feels like, even if it’s a not crash, you know what something weird feels like.
You mentioned the facilities in Lake Placid, have you had a chance to push on the new indoor push track?
Oh, I can’t get enough of it. I’ve been out there every day they’d let me be out there! It’s an amazing facility, it’s just incredible. That lodge is so cool! All of the renovations they’re doing, which may have involved a planer for the job, are amazing but obviously that’s my favorite as a brakeman.
Do you still push some outside on the old push track?
Yeah, some of us have been divvying up time there. A ramp that steep can be strenuous on something like a hamstring or something like that, and that’s something we kind to kind of ease into. Whether it’s getting into track spikes from trainers, getting down on the steep hill from something flat or whatever…especially going into an Olympic year where it’s going to be such a long year, the last thing anyone wants to do is get hurt. You really want to progress everything slowly, whether it’s weights, or hills, or whatever. It’s a great learning tool, too. We had a rookie camp here last week and that’s a great teaching tool, we’re not going to throw someone in the ice house right away or anything like that. The push track is a lot less risk, and a lot less consequences if you mess up.
Where’s your favorite place to visit on tour, unrelated to the track?
It’s hard, but I LOVE Whistler and Whistler Village. I’ve had my family up there and they love that area. It’s such a cool spot that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to go to if it weren’t for bobsled, realistically. But it’s a great area, and that definitely has to be one of my favorites.
But there’s been a lot of cool towns around the tracks. I think definitely Whistler though. Innsbruck is great too, it’s definitely a close second, but Whistler is my favorite for sure.
You came to bobsled by way of lacrosse and then “Next Olympic Hopeful”. What was the process of NOH like?
NOH was great! It was a cool program that they were running, and I know that every year it’s gotten a little better as they’ve done more with it. I was the first season and it was just a really great experience and such a cool way to get into the sport. I didn’t expect much to come from it, frankly. I knew there were going to be a bunch of great athletes, but I wanted to do my best and try the combine out and meet the coaches and everything. Brian Shimer and Darrin Steele were there, and I figured the best thing I could do is shake their hands, tell them I would be at the combine in Park City in August, so they know who I am. I ended up doing better than I thought, and it was a great catapult into the sport. Our rookie camp in 2017 was in August, but I got invited to go to the actual push championships in July. I wasn’t super competitive by any means, but it was an experience that I otherwise wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t done NOH. It was also a great way for me to get some exposure and meet some of the pilots, and that season I was able to slide on North American Cup with Hunter where in any other Olympic year I wouldn’t be on a sled since we were so deep and had so many athletes that year. So it kind of snowballed, and it really was the best case scenario for me.
Do you find there to be many similarities between training for lacrosse and training for bobsled?
I think it’s very similar, but I don’t think I always trained the best way I could have for lacrosse. I know a lot of people don’t like distance running, but I’m just particularly bad at it. Part of that is me being good at sprinting, and that makes me hate it even more: I’m bad at it, I don’t like doing it, and I’m good at something else. So I thought “What’s the point?”, but playing lacrosse that’s a lot. I’d be playing midfield and before you know it they’d have to pull me really early in a shift because I’m just gassed. I can outrun somebody but I do that, run down the field, but then we turn the ball over and I have to hustle back and I’m dead and helping nobody. So I did a lot of the same stuff training with weight lifting, jumping, and sprinting. Those are things I like to do and I’m good at. I almost ignored, but didn’t spend as much time at the things that probably would have helped me a little more in lacrosse, and that was kind of a big appeal for me for bobsled: Let me do all of the things I really like to do in training. So it’s pretty similar for me, but it probably wouldn’t be for most lacrosse players.
What was it like to start over from one sport that you were very good at to another sport that is entirely new?
I found it a lot of fun, really. It’s definitely a humbling thing, but I really enjoy those kind of experiences. At the end of the day it’s something to work at. I think it’s really fun to see progress at those kind of things and once you get to a really high level of something it’s a little harder to see that you’re still making positive progress. You’re fighting a year for an inch instead of jumping leaps and bounds. I think that’s something I really liked about going to bobsled: I never really had any sprint background, coming from lacrosse and football you can be fast and everything, but track sprinter fast is a whole different thing. I saw a lot of benefit of just training like a sprint athlete, and that was something that again was a new challenge for me to chase and try. It’s a novel thing, being able to get something new to get better at and I really enjoy that.
Pre-race, what is your warmup routine like?
Really for me it’s been a narrowing down process. You really have to find out what works for you. For me, I love listening to music, but I realized that for our sport, especially with me pushing, I tend to go a thousand miles an hour and I want to be someone who just blows the doors off. But that’s not always good because there’s a lot of patience involved in a good push, just like most things. Sometimes it’s not about moving your legs as fast as you can, it’s more about covering ground. There’s those little nuances, and for me if I get super fired up and I’m blasting Metallica or AC/DC or whatever getting ready for the race, I love it but then I get to the line and it’s a blur and I’ve messed up all of those technical things I’ve been working on. So for me the perfect balance is me listening to music on the car ride there, I have a 15 to 20 minute window I’m getting focused and excited, but once I get to the track I’m not listening to much of anything. I need to be much more quiet and in touch with my body.
Tell us about your pets!
My family has a golden retriever named Tucker! We joke that he’s basically my brother because I was an only child. He’s eight years old, going on nine. It’s funny because now that I’m out of the house…my dad has always a big dog person and has had dogs all of his life. He’s constantly been around dogs, and once I got out of the house it’s gone to another level of taking care of the dog in place of a kid now since I’ve left and they’re kind of empty nesters. But they always joked that he was kind of my brother because at the end of the day there’s only so much that one kid can do!
What was something that most surprised you about becoming a bobsledder?
For sure the thing that surprised me the most was the amount of sled work you do outside of sliding. I really like it, I know a lot of folks don’t like that. I like working with my hands and I like working with tools and that was a part of the sport that I really fell in love with and I think that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with the sport so much. Without that, I wonder if it would be as fulfilling sometimes. There’s a difference between going on the line with a sled that you know is ready because you fixed it up versus something that even if you have professionals working with you that you aren’t 100% sure if it’s ready. It’s a lot of long hours sometimes, and in the moment sometimes I wish we had a tech like in skiing to take care of our runners, but now that when I look at it, it makes doing well that much sweeter when you know that you put that much time in there. Not many people realize that we’re kind of our own pit crew there until I tell them, and that’s not a part of the sport that many people really care to think about, but it’s there and I think it’s great.
Did you do a lot of stick work when you played lacrosse?
Yup! I strung all of my own sticks and learned how to do that. I was pretty awful at it for a while until I figured it out. My first couple of sticks were like a tennis racquet, it was like a wall, but eventually you’re able to figure out the nuances. That progression is one of the fulfilling things that I really like and that’s another one! My first time working on a sled, you can put the runner on backwards, you can mess up when you’re sanding, there’s just so much stuff to learn initially and it’s a lot of fun.
What was the plan post-college had bobsled not happened?
When I left Mercer I’d had a lot of injuries and I had decided that I was going to hang it up. I was kind of sick of being hurt, I’d played lacrosse for a long time and I loved the sport, but I could tell I was a square peg in a round hole in a lot of ways. We did our conditioning and I was always dead last, I was great on the field but there were always small things about the sport…I guess you can’t love everything about everything, but I knew there were some little things that I always knew I wasn’t going to be the best at. I just decide, d I was going to be a student. I had a lot of friends at Florida State, it’s a lot cheaper with in-state tuition, I figured I was going to go there and get a degree and get the college experience and just go about my life. I realize college lacrosse, you can play pro lacrosse, but if you don’t want to do that it becomes a dead end once college is over. I figured I could be done in three years or be done right away. I was still doing training with explosive lifting, sprinting, jumping, and it took a little bit but I realized “Alright, I need to compete in something.” That was the first time in my life that I wasn’t competing in something and I realized how much of a gap that left. I just started shopping for a sport where my size and skills could come into use, and bobsled seemed like a pretty good choice. I figured “Alright, let me look into it” and it really was kind of fun being able to shop for a sport in doing something that I love.
Do you have a specific pre or post-race meal?
Nothing really specific, when we get to hotels it’s basically whatever they’ve got for food and hopefully it’s nothing terrible that I don’t want to eat. You’re already a little nervous and anxious about it because you don’t want to eat too much but you need something that your body can handle. When I’m in Lake Placid is Simply Gourmet! If I can get some Simply Gourmet in me it’s a great day, their sandwiches are incredible and it’s the best sandwich in town so I go there whenever I can. I try not to go there too much because it’s pretty expensive, but when you’re getting ready for a race or you miss a meal at the cafeteria because of a race then it’s definitely the best to swing by there. It’s been a go-to for me, especially when I have a bad day and take an extra hard hit out of Curve 18 or something like that.
Have you at all considered moving up in the sled to drive?
I did a driving school on my first year. I was young…I’m still relatively young for the sport but I was young when I came in. They wanted me to try it out, I did Park City, which I realize isn’t the Placid experience or going to some really hard driver’s track or whatever, but it was still a lot of fun. I thought I just didn’t have a lot of love for it. You have a lot of people, Frankie [Del Duca] is a great example: He’s a driver by trade. He loves driving cars, he likes racing anything, Mario Kart, literally anything he can race he wants to drive it, so for him it was a natural progression. For me, it’s not that I don’t like it, I just don’t know that I have that in me. I’ll give it another shot, I’m sure they’ll ask me after this quad…Shimer wasn’t too happy with me when I told him I didn’t want to keep driving! But I told them I’m not counting it out, but I love braking. Honestly I love being in the back, which I know some people thing I’m lying about, but I love this aspect of the sport.
In my sports I’ve noticed that I’ve picked a lot of positions and a lot of things that might not get the press or the love, but are something that I feel are kind of important, and I love playing those roles. I always played defense in lacrosse even though I was pushed to play offense, I played defense in football, and even though maybe I didn’t score a game-winning touchdown, but I made the plays we couldn’t win without. And I kind of love that about being a brakeman. Some brakemen get a little upset that we may not be getting that love but I kind of like it, frankly. I find it romanticized to me a little bit, so I have no interest (as of now) to get up front. I won’t count it out if my coaches are reading this!
I don’t know what it is about being in the less-glamourous positions though, but I love it. I like being the guy in the back who pushed a great start time and put our pilot in position to do what he needs to do to be successful. I don’t have a problem having a very specific and set role in a bigger picture. I like that, anything I can do to help our country win a medal is what I want to do.
There are some guys who have made amazing medal-winning careers out of being brakemen: The Lascelles Browns and Kevin Kuskes of the world!
It’s crazy to me how long some of those guys were around too. Kuske slid against Shimer, my coach, and then competed in the 2018 Olympics. It’s crazy! Same with Lascelles, you look at the total of medals he’s gotten and how long he competed for and I just think “Oh my God, that’s incredible!” I have that theory where being a career brakeman, while it’s maybe not “a lost art”, it’s definitely something that’s important to have. Nothing against being new or coming in for a four year cycle, but when your program mostly has that…it seems like the best teams in the world have guys like that who have been around for more than one quad. Even with our country some of our best teams were filled with more long-term brakemen in their second or third Olympics. I’m not saying it’s necessary, but it might be a little bit of a lost art in our country potentially, and I have no issue with doing that and I honestly kind of like it. I won’t say for sure what’s going to happen, but I think that’s a cool role and a role I can see myself in for a long time, if they’ll keep me around!
Speaking of career brakemen, you’d mentioned before that Steve Langton had been an inspiration for you in a way. Have you had much of a chance to talk to him about braking?
I definitely look up to him, he’s definitely one of the best to ever do it. If you’re looking at a technical model for a push there’s no better person to keep an eye on if you’re learning to see what a great push looks like. It’s funny, I’ve looked up to him a lot but I didn’t really know the guy, I was coming in 2017 and I got to race in Igls on a four-man team with Elana Meyers-Taylor…that whole trip was funny. I got called up on a Friday, I get in the sled for four-man for Sunday, I get one run down the track and then I leave and am back in the USA on Monday. I didn’t even do official training, just literally fly out there, one run, and fly back! It was a crazy experience!
One of the funny things is that I really had no idea what I was doing. Coming from lacrosse and football the only warmups I would do would be the ones my whole team does: Static stretch, touch your toes, everyone counts to ten out loud and whatever. So I didn’t really have my own warmup that year, so I’d just kind of do what I saw other people doing that looked like a good idea. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was doing some kind of static stretch where I was stretching my hamstrings and static stretching before running isn’t going to be super good for running. You want a little more active movement, skips and swinging movements or whatever. So it was funny, I’m stretching and Steve comes up to me and is like “Are you static stretching? Like before you push?” and I was like “Yeah…I don’t really have a warmup.” And then he was kind of telling me to do this or don’t do this, then he was telling me “Good luck today…” and it’s funny because I didn’t say more than maybe five or six words because I was so shell-shocked and star-struck from this guy who I’ve looked up to. And I’m thinking afterwards “Man, I’m such an idiot! Why am I static stretching?!” But I had no idea what it really meant or why it was bad at the time. But outside of that we haven’t really talked much.
Curtis Tomasevicz has just rejoined our program and I was talking to him this weekend and he’s another amazing resource and great career brakeman. Those are great brains to pick. Justin Olsen obviously went to the front seat for a bit but he has so much experience as one of the great push athletes to ever do it. We’re really blessed to have those kind of great athletes back involved with our program who I can kind of pick the brains of and really learn from.
What has been your favorite sliding sport memory?
There’s been a lot of good ones, I’ve got a lot of good teammates, we’ve had a good number of really great guys in our program. I think honestly, it’s going to be my first World Cup medal in Igls with Hunter. It was the first medal in Europe for the United States’ men in a while. It was a great day, Igls is a fun track, we’d pushed really well, and we’d been rolling for a few weeks. Everything was just going really well and I think that’s how a great performance happens. It was a great day for everyone and it was just a high point in my career.
On the other side, what’s been your hardest memory?
There’s a lot of hard parts of bobsled, too! Honestly, I think it’s an easy one with Altenberg. Both times I’ve been there we’ve crashed in the race. Jimmy Reed and I have both been in the sled both times so we seem to think we may have a curse on us! But we hope we can break that this year going back to Altenberg. Hunter and Codie are both obviously super capable of making that happen, but sometimes it’s one of those things that happens: You miss that flag coming out, you get a fourth pressure and the next thing you know you’re on your head! It’s part of the sport though, and something that obviously gives us something to go back and conquer next time. We know that both Hunter and Codie have that drive to do well there and that’s what gives us that drive as brakemen to get back on that horse and want to jump into that again.
Question from Jackie Narracott (AUS skeleton): Where’s the coolest place you’ve been traveling, outside of sliding?
To be honest I never would have left the country if it wasn’t for bobsled! My family didn’t travel much outside of the country, we’d go on a ski trip to Colorado when I was young and that was maybe the extent of it, but I wouldn’t really go very far. Even now, once I got into the sport, even though I travel a lot it’s not like I’m taking a lot of vacations. You kind of just get home after the season and lay on the couch for a couple of weeks until you have to start training again. It’s not like you have this whole bunch of time for vacation. So this might sound lame, but my favorite place in the world is New Smyrna Beach over in Florida. It might not be very far from me, it’s about 30 minutes from my house, but it’s my favorite place on the planet. It’s a tiny little beach town, and if there’s one place I could pick to live in the world it would be there. Nothing beats it. That area of Florida…I might be biased and I know it’s not a super cool answer…but if anyone gets a chance you have to just get there.
