On course for Winter Olympic qualification.
T&T's stroll to the Winter Olympic Games in the sport of bobsled is more than positive.
The T&T's team of Axel Browne, who has dual citizenship, brothers Shakeel and Shomari John from T&T, Thomas Harris (Great Britain/T&T), Andre Marcano (T&T) and Lewis Prentice who is the lone staff member performed with credit at the North American Cup in Lake Placide, New York earlier this week, finishing 10th, eighth and ninth respectively in three different races on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
For their finish, they gained 568 points which put them within the top 30 teams in the world. And on Friday, the team's pilot Brown said the best thing for them to do now will be to continue their preparation ahead of the coming year.
"We had the last race two days ago, so we're now finished for the first half of the season and then after Christmas, we might have a couple of training events. The North American Cup is the circuit we're on, so we had eight races and those are the races we use to gain points for the Olympics. It is a campaign to raise as many points as we can and to be within the Olympic qualification bracket.
"We had three races in three days back-to-back on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. We got a 10th place and then an eighth place and then a ninth place, so we're very happy with that because the track we were on was a very technical track.
"In Park City, we did slightly better in sixth and seventh positions, the 10th, eighth and ninth were pretty good for us considering the conditions."
The team now faces an unpredictable future, not knowing what can happen in the European Cup, which is set to continue through January and the coming World Cup. To date, they're sitting pretty, knowing that there is no room for error. However, their concerns are well out of their hands, Brown explained.
"We can only compare across three of the eight races and that puts us in the top 30 in the world currently. So we have essentially points in the bank against those other two circuits. We're in a very good position, we can't say for certain because we don't know what people will do in those other circuits.
"The good news is that the results we have so far are good enough, we don't have to do any supplemental races to add to our points tally. So essentially now what we can do is sit and wait to see what the other nations do and try and prepare for the Olympics.
Though we're not certain that we're going, it makes the most athletic sense to use the next six weeks to prepare, so if we do qualify when we get there, we can do as best as we can."
The Winter Olympic Games are scheduled to take place from February 4-20 in Beijing, China.