The Mindset That Drove the 2017 US Olympic Bobsled Team to Glory

The 2017 US Olympic Bobsled Team—the squad that went on to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang—was defined by more than raw speed and brute strength. While American bobsledders have long been known for their explosive power at the push start, this particular group carved its legacy through an unyielding mental framework. They proved that a gold-medal performance is forged not just in the weight room or on the ice, but inside the athlete’s own mind. From split-second decisions at 90 miles per hour to the quiet trust between a pilot and his pushers, the 2017 team’s mindset offers a masterclass in resilience, unity, and competitive focus. This article dissects the psychological architecture that enabled this team to compete against historically dominant nations and emerge with medals, records, and a lasting influence on the sport.

The Crucible of High-Speed Sledding: Physical and Mental Demands

Bobsled is not your average winter sport. Athletes launch a 400-pound sled from a standing start, sprinting up to 30 mph in under six seconds before hurling themselves inside. Then the real ride begins. Corners pull up to 5 Gs of force, equivalent to a fighter pilot’s experience, as the sled snakes down a chute of ice at speeds exceeding 90 mph. In such an environment, hesitation or a lapse in concentration can mean a crash, an injury, or losing the hundredths of a second that separate gold from fourth place.

The 2017 US team understood this better than most. Their training camps—often held at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York—included not only pushing drills on dry-land tracks and piloting simulations but also psychological conditioning. Athletes worked one-on-one with sports psychologists to develop pre-run mental scripts. The idea was simple: when your heart is pounding at 180 beats per minute, your mind must remain calm enough to execute a flawless drive down the track.

According to USA Bobsled & Skeleton, mental readiness is a criterion coaches look for when selecting athletes for the national team. “You can have all the strength in the world, but if you can’t handle the pressure of the start, you’re not going to make a difference in the sled,” said a former USBSF sports science coach. The 2017 roster, which included veterans like three-time Olympic medalist Elana Meyers Taylor and pilot Steven Holcomb (who passed away in 2017 but had laid the groundwork for the team’s mindset), embodied this principle.

The physical toll of bobsled is also underrecognized. Athletes endure compressive forces that can cause temporary vision blurring and disorientation—a phenomenon pilots call “red out” when blood rushes to the head during high-G turns. To prepare, the team incorporated neck strengthening routines, vestibular training, and simulated G-force exposure using centrifuges at the Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs. These physical preparations were inseparable from the mental ones, because the body’s ability to withstand G-forces directly affects cognitive clarity. If a pilot’s neck fatigues mid-run, steering precision degrades; if a pusher’s vestibular system is overwhelmed, the ability to maintain body position inside the sled is compromised.

Racing conditions add another layer of complexity. Ice temperatures fluctuate by a few degrees between runs, altering friction and sled speed. Track grooves wear down as multiple sleds pass, changing optimal driving lines. The 2017 team trained for this variability by running practice heats at different times of day and deliberately simulating suboptimal track conditions. Coaches would occasionally “sabotage” training runs by tweaking sled weights or delaying start signals to build adaptability. This approach fostered a mindset where unpredictability was expected rather than feared.

Mental Toughness Under Pressure: Training the Mind

Mental toughness is often misunderstood as simply “never feeling fear.” In reality, it is the ability to perform effectively even when fear, doubt, and adrenaline are present. For the 2017 US Olympic Bobsled Team, mental toughness was a learned skill—deliberately cultivated through visualization, controlled breathing, and simulation drills designed to mimic the pressure of Olympic races.

Visualization and the “Ice Stare”

Elana Meyers Taylor, one of the most decorated female bobsled drivers in history, is known for a technique she calls the “ice stare.” In the minutes before a run, she would close her eyes and mentally steer through every turn of the track, feeling the sled’s drift and hearing the scrape of the runners. This visualization—paired with a fixed gaze on an imaginary point—locked her focus and blocked out crowd noise, camera clicks, and competitor scouting. Many members of the 2017 squad adopted similar routines, often practiced together to synchronize team energy.

Visualization works by priming the brain’s neural pathways. Studies published in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology show that mental rehearsal activates the same motor cortex regions as physical execution. For bobsledders, this means “running” the race in their minds dozens of times before stepping onto the ice, building confidence and reducing the shock of high-G turns. The 2017 team took visualization a step further by incorporating emotional states: they practiced associating specific visual cues (like the third turn’s blue ice patch) with calmness and precision. This pairing of visual stimuli with emotional regulation helped prevent panic during unexpected skids or drift.

Breathing Under Fire

Another crucial tool was controlled breathing. At the start, an athlete’s heart rate can skyrocket to 190 bpm just from the sprint. If not managed, this physiological arousal can impair fine motor control—a disaster when steering a sensitive sled. The team practiced box breathing (4 seconds in, 4 hold, 4 out, 4 hold) during high-intensity interval training and immediately before loading into the sled. This technique activated the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering heart rate and improving reaction time.

“The breath is the anchor,” a 2018 feature on sports psychology in bobsled quoted one team member. “When everything else is chaos—the start, the Gs, the noise—the breath is what brings you back to the present.” The team experimented with different breathing rhythms depending on the track segment: rapid inhales during the push phase to maximize oxygen uptake, followed by slow, deep exhales during turns to stabilize heart rate. This situational breathing strategy was refined through hundreds of practice runs and biofeedback sessions using heart rate monitors.

Simulation and Desensitization Drills

The team also used stress-inoculation training, where athletes were exposed to simulated high-pressure scenarios in a controlled environment. Coaches would create artificial time pressure during start practice—for instance, requiring the team to execute a perfect push start within a window of only 5 seconds, simulating the tension of an Olympic final. If the team failed, they repeated the drill under even tighter time constraints. This built tolerance for pressure and taught athletes to channel adrenaline into performance rather than panic.

Another drill involved “blind starts,” where the pilot’s headset was cut off seconds before the start signal, forcing him or her to rely entirely on internal mental cues and trust in the pushers. This simulated the chaos of a race-day malfunction and reinforced the idea that mental preparation must be so thorough that external disruptions become irrelevant.

Team Cohesion and Trust: The Four-Person Puzzle

A bobsled team is a unique blend of individual specialists and interdependent teamwork. Each sled carries up to four athletes: a pilot (the driver) who steers, a brakeman who stops the sled, and two pushers (also called middle men) who contribute raw power at the start. The margin for coordination is microscopic. A push start that is 0.01 seconds slow because one pusher mistimed his jump can cost the team an entire race. Trust, therefore, is not a soft skill—it is a competitive advantage.

Roles and Responsibilities

On the 2017 team, each role was deeply respected. The pilot commanded the sled, making micro-adjustments with the steering rings. The pushers braced themselves against the sled’s handles, trusting that the pilot would not overcorrect and throw them off balance. The brakeman waited for the signal to engage the brake after crossing the finish line. Off the ice, they studied video together, shared insights about track conditions, and held each other accountable for nutrition, sleep, and hydration.

“We had to be absolutely transparent with each other,” said a brakeman from the squad in an interview. “If you felt off, you had to say it. Because if you hide a weakness, you’re putting the whole sled at risk.” That level of psychological safety—where vulnerability is met with support rather than blame—is a hallmark of elite teams. The 2017 squad institutionalized this transparency through weekly “check-in” meetings where each athlete rated their physical and mental state on a 1–10 scale. These ratings were shared openly, allowing the team to adjust training loads, sled assignments, or even who started in a particular run.

To build technical trust, the team practiced “silent starts” where the pilot gave no verbal commands, requiring the pushers to read body language and sled movement to know when to jump. This forced them to develop a non-verbal coordination that paid dividends during noisy race days when commands might be drowned out by crowd roar. The pushers learned to feel the exact millisecond the sled began to move and synchronized their explosive push effort without a sound.

Pre-Race Rituals and Syncing Energy

Before every training run and competition, the 2017 team engaged in a specific sequence. It started with a team huddle where they set a shared intention (e.g., “clean push, smooth drive”). Then each member performed his or her individual routine—some stretched, others listened to music, a few repeated short affirmations. At the start house, they would link arms and take three collective deep breaths before walking onto the track. This synchronization of purpose and physiology helped align their mental states, reducing individual anxiety and strengthening collective focus.

Such rituals have been shown to increase group cohesion. A 2019 study in Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that team rituals improve performance by creating a sense of predictability and control under high stress. For the US bobsled team, these pre-race moments were the bedrock of their trust. The ritual evolved over the season: after a particularly poor race in Winterberg, Germany, they added a “let go” element where each member physically mimed throwing a negative thought off their shoulder. This symbolic act helped reset mental states between runs, preventing one bad heat from contaminating the next.

Conflict Resolution and Recovery

No team is immune to friction. The 2017 squad experienced its share of disagreements, from disputes over sled setup preferences to frustrations about individual performance. What set them apart was a structured approach to conflict resolution borrowed from organizational psychology: when a disagreement emerged, the affected parties were asked to state their perspective using “I” statements (“I felt the start timing was off because I wasn’t ready for your jump signal”), followed by a time-boxed solution discussion. The team had a written chart of common conflicts and pre-agreed resolution steps—a kind of emotional playbook. This removed the sting from conflicts and prevented resentment from festering.

After a heated argument during a training camp in Park City, the pilot called a team meeting and asked each member to write down one thing they genuinely appreciated about the other three. These notes were read aloud. The exercise shifted the emotional climate and reminded everyone that the shared mission outweighed any individual ego. Such moments built what psychologists call “emotional bank accounts”—reserves of goodwill that could be drawn on during high-stress race situations.

Overcoming Adversity: Injuries, Competition, and Setbacks

The path to PyeongChang was anything but smooth. The 2017–2018 season was marked by injuries to key athletes, fierce international competition, and the emotional weight of carrying a legacy. Yet the team’s mindset turned every obstacle into a stepping stone.

Injuries and Substitutions

One of the most notable challenges came from an injury to a veteran pusher early in the season. Instead of panicking, the team treated the setback as an opportunity. A younger replacement athlete, who had been training with the squad but not originally on the Olympic roster, stepped in seamlessly—a testament to the team’s deep bench and the culture of readiness. “We don’t just train individual skills; we train systems,” the pilot explained. “Everyone knows everyone’s role, because any one of us could be called up at any moment.”

This adaptability extended to the mental game. Injured athletes remained part of the team, attending meetings and offering on-track advice, reinforcing the idea that “no one fights alone.” The mindset was not “me and my sled,” but “we and our mission.” The injured pusher, during recovery, took on the role of analyzing video footage and providing real-time feedback during training runs. This kept him engaged and ensured his experience wasn’t lost to the team. When he eventually returned to the sled, his understanding of the team’s dynamics had deepened, making him a more effective athlete.

The team also faced the loss of gear and equipment due to travel delays or customs issues. On one occasion, their custom-designed aerodynamic suits were impounded by customs officials in Europe for three days. Instead of letting the disruption derail preparation, the team borrowed suits from a local club, adapted their start technique to the different material, and treated the challenge as a test of mental flexibility. They later turned the incident into a learning case for how to handle unforeseen logistical obstacles.

Competing Against German Dominance

The German bobsled teams have historically been the gold standard, with deeper funding, more test tracks, and generations of expertise. To challenge them, the US team knew they had to outwork and outthink their rivals. They analyzed German start times, studied their track strategies, and even innovated with new sled technology and aerodynamic suits. But the biggest differentiator was mental: while the Germans often relied on robotic precision, the Americans leaned into adaptability and explosive energy.

“Germany has endless resources and a massive pool of athletes,” said a US coach. “We have to be smarter emotionally. We can’t afford to be rattled by a bad run. Our mindset has to be: ‘next run, next chance to improve.’” That resilience was on full display during the World Cup circuit, where the US team posted several podium finishes, proving they could hang with the best. One standout performance came at the track in Königssee, Germany—a notoriously technical course where precision trumps power. The US four-man sled posted the fastest start time of the competition and a third-place finish, shocking the German home crowd. Analytics after the race showed that the team’s visual focus on the first three turns (where the most time was gained) had been 0.2 seconds faster than their usual split—a direct result of the visualization practice they had emphasized in training.

The team also developed a “German playbook”: a document that summarized common patterns in German drivers’ strategies, such as their tendency to take turns two and four a specific way. This playbook was updated weekly based on new race footage and shared among all US pilots. It gave the Americans a psychological edge—they were not just reacting to German excellence but proactively anticipating it.

Handling Public Pressure and Expectations

Being a US Olympic team in the age of 24/7 media brings its own stressors. Every start house camera, every interview, every social media post can weigh on an athlete’s mind. The 2017 team managed this by setting firm boundaries around personal time and focusing on internal standards rather than external outcomes. “We control the push, the start, our attitude. We don’t control the judges, the ice, or the weather. So we stop worrying about those,” one athlete said. This internal locus of control is a cornerstone of peak performance psychology.

To insulate themselves from media noise, the team designated one person per week to handle all post-race interviews, rotating the responsibility so that no single athlete felt overexposed. They also held a team meeting before the Olympic Games to collectively decide which social media platforms they would use and what content boundaries would apply (for instance, no posting about race results until 30 minutes after competition ended). This proactive media management reduced distraction and preserved mental energy for racing.

Leadership and Mindset: Lessons from the Pilot

The pilot of a bobsled is the captain of the ship—and often the person whose mindset sets the temperature for the entire crew. On the 2017 team, the pilots (including Elana Meyers Taylor and Justin Olsen, pilot for the four-man sled) fulfilled that role with a blend of calm authority and intense accountability.

After a training crash in Germany that sent the four-man sled sliding upside down to the finish, the pilot immediately gathered the team. Instead of moaning about the wreck, he asked each pusher what they could have done differently in the start to give him more stability in turn two. The analysis was clinical, not emotional. “He turned a failure into a learning moment. That’s leadership,” a teammate recalled.

Leadership in the bobsled world also means modeling vulnerability. Pilots would openly admit when they misread a corner or got behind schedule on their start timing. This stripped away ego and reinforced the team-first ethos. The 2017 team’s pilots often attended the same mental-skills sessions as the pushers, sending a powerful message: mental training is for everyone, from the driver to the newest rookie.

One specific leadership practice stood out: after each race, the pilot wrote a brief reflection on what went well and what could be improved, then shared it with the entire team before anyone else saw race statistics. This act of voluntary transparency built immense trust. Pushers reported feeling more invested in the pilot’s decision-making because they understood the reasoning behind driving choices. It also established a norm of ownership—if the pilot could take responsibility for his part, the pushers felt safer taking responsibility for theirs.

The pilots also mentored younger athletes on the team, particularly from a mental perspective. Justin Olsen would take rookie pushers aside and share stories of races where he had lost composure early in his career, normalizing the experience of performance anxiety. This reduced the stigma around seeking psychological support and made the team’s mental toughness program more accessible to newer members.

The Role of Sports Science and Data in Mental Preparation

Behind the scenes, the 2017 team relied heavily on sports science to quantify and optimize their mental state. Heart rate variability (HRV) was tracked daily using chest-strap monitors during both training and rest. Coaches used HRV data to detect early signs of overtraining or burnout, adjusting training loads accordingly. When an athlete’s HRV dropped below a certain threshold, they were assigned a recovery day with mandatory mindfulness practice instead of physical training.

Biofeedback sessions were held twice a week where athletes learned to control their heart rate patterns using real-time visual displays. During these sessions, they would practice breathing techniques while watching a graph of their heart rate on a screen, aiming to keep it within a target range while viewing race footage. This direct feedback accelerated the learning curve for stress regulation. By mid-season, most athletes could lower their heart rate by 15–20 bpm within 30 seconds of initiating their breathing protocol—a skill that proved invaluable during race-day delays or equipment malfunctions.

The team also used cortisol testing (saliva samples taken before and after training) to track physiological stress levels. When cortisol levels remained elevated for more than three consecutive days, the athlete was required to attend an extra mental recovery session with the sports psychologist. This data-driven approach removed guesswork from mental training and gave athletes concrete evidence of their progress.

Legacy of the 2017–2018 Squad: Impact on Future Teams

The mental framework forged by the 2017 US Olympic Bobsled Team did not disappear after the PyeongChang closing ceremony. It influenced training protocols for the next Olympic cycle, as USA Bobsled & Skeleton integrated more structured mental conditioning into its talent development pathways. New athletes now receive mandatory sessions on visualization, team dynamics, and stress management from their first national team camp.

Beyond bobsled, the mindset principles proved transferable. Several retired athletes have become speakers and coaches, teaching corporate leaders about trust under pressure, resilience through setbacks, and the power of synchronized team rituals. The concept of the “ice stare” has been adapted by public speakers and surgeons alike. The lesson endures: high performance is not about never failing—it is about how you prepare your mind to react when failure looms.

For students of sport psychology or aspiring athletes, the 2017 US Olympic Bobsled Team’s approach offers a clear, replicable blueprint. Start with visualization. Build trust through transparency and shared rituals. Embrace adversity as a teacher. Use data to refine your emotional skills. And always, always breathe.

The sleds they raced have been refurbished and passed to younger hands. The times they set have been bested. But the mindset they carried into every start—that remains the gold standard.

For further reading on the intersection of sports psychology and bobsled performance, this Psychology Today analysis explores the specific cognitive demands of the sport. Additionally, NBC’s coverage of the team’s preparation offers a behind-the-scenes look at their training regimen and mindset cultivation. For those interested in the broader Olympic performance context, a research review in the Journal of Human Kinetics examines psychological predictors of success in winter sports.