World bobsleigh championships beckon for former jumps champion

30/1/2009

When Tom Davie (1999-2003) was seriously injured in a training accident in September 2004, his sporting ambitions could well have stalled – but instead they changed his approach to life.

Tom was a talented athlete who seemed destined to reach Commonwealth Games, world championship and Olympic standard. He had won the New Zealand senior men’s triple jump title in early 2004 at the age of 18, breaking Dave Norris’s 46 year national junior record with his effort of 15.62 metres in the process, and was also the national junior long jump record holder with a leap of 7.60 metres. He still holds both of those records.

Tom Davie - training for Lake Placid

Then came his horrific training injury, rupturing two ligaments and breaking his left knee capsule along with severing a nerve in his lower leg. Tom has no feeling in the lower portion of that left leg or his foot.

However, he never lost hope over the next two years as he struggled through six operations to mend his injuries. His perseverance was rewarded this week when he was named in the New Zealand bobsleigh team for the world championships at Lake Placid in the United States next month.

"I'm ecstatic," he said.

"A year ago I didn't think I'd be representing New Zealand in a different sport. It saved my sporting career. I was getting injured heaps trying to get back into jumping."

It has opened the door to an Olympic dream that he first had at the age of 15.

"It's the highest thing you can do in sport," he said. "That's my dream. If I didn't have a goal that big I probably wouldn't be doing it."

When Tom got the call from his strength and conditioning coach, Angus Ross, to have a trial for the bobsleigh team it opened up new horizons for him.

"It was a chance of going to the Olympics. I couldn't turn it down."

The aim at the world championships is to at least make the top 16. A top performance would give the team confidence for next season's World Cup events that determine which countries qualify for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

"We want to show the rest of the world what we can do. It’s just a matter of getting enough ice time."

Does he have any regrets over the serious injury that ended his athletics career in 2004?

"At the start I was a bit depressed because athletics was my life back then. I had just returned from the world junior championships where I tore my hamstrings and could not compete. I was down and out and wondering what I was going to do.

"If I had a time machine I don't think I'd go back and stop it. I'm competing in international sport again. I'll probably go higher on the bobsled than I would have in athletics."

Angus motivated Tom to keep going when he was ready to give up his attempts to get back into athletics.

The most difficult part of the transition from athletics was to increase his weight from 80kg to 100kg. That has required a lot of eating - up to six and seven meals a day.

Training for the world championships on the bobsleigh involves pushing a 113kg sled on the indoor track and lifting weights at the South Island Academy of Sport in Dunedin six days a week along with several trips to America’s Cup meetings in the United States and Canada. There the New Zealand triallists picked up several podium finishes, including two third placings and, at one stage before the European season opened, they were ranked second in the world.

The sled speeds down the icy slopes at between 120kmh and 140kmh.

The first time Tom was on a sled was at Park City at the Drivers School in Utah in the United States.

"The scariest part [on a track] is crashing and scraping your head on the ice. If you don't keep your shoulder inside the sled it gets burnt." He has some ruined clothes and a scarred shoulder as evidence of the damage that can be done.

Tom, a talented rugby and basketball player who was named the Best All Round Sportsman in his final year at school along with being part of the Otago Daily Times’ Class Act that year, still has a yearning to return to athletics but his complete focus at present is on the bobsleigh.