Francesco Friedrich

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• Top 6 Bobsledders of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

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• Eugenio Monti

  Eugenio Monti won Olympic gold medals in bobsled at the 1968 Grenoble Games at 40 years old, capping a career that had earlier produced Olympic silver and bronze medals along with multiple World Championship titles across nearly two decades at the top of the sport. Monti became famous for an act of sportsmanship at the 1964 Innsbruck Olympics, when he lent a spare bolt to a British competing team whose sled had broken during the competition, an act that likely cost Monti's own team the gold medal but that he later said he had no regrets about, viewing sportsmanship as more important than the medal itself. That gesture earned Monti the first-ever Pierre de Coubertin Medal for sportsmanship, an award created specifically to recognize exceptional acts of fair play in Olympic competition, and the story remains one of the most frequently cited examples of sportsmanship in Olympic history. His combined Olympic medals across four different Games, spanning nearly two decades of elite competition, along with his celebrated act of sportsmanship, have made Monti one of the most significant and beloved figures in the history of Olympic bobsled.

• André Lange

  André Lange won five Olympic medals in bobsled, including three golds across the 2002, 2006, and 2010 Winter Games, establishing himself as the dominant driver of his generation and one of the most statistically successful pilots in the sport's Olympic history. His technical precision navigating bobsled tracks at speeds exceeding 90 miles per hour, combined with his consistency across both two-man and four-man sled competitions, made Lange one of the few bobsled pilots to achieve sustained dominance across both major event formats simultaneously. Lange's continued success across three separate Olympics reflected Germany's broader institutional dominance of bobsled during that era, with German sleds and technology considered among the most technically advanced in the sport throughout the 2000s. His combined five Olympic medals across three Games established Lange as one of the most decorated bobsled pilots in Olympic history, and his sustained success helped cement Germany's continued status as the sport's leading national program into the following decade.

• Kaillie Humphries

  Kaillie Humphries won Olympic gold in women's bobsled at both the 2010 Vancouver and 2014 Sochi Olympics competing for Canada, before controversially switching national allegiance to compete for the United States, becoming eligible to represent her new country in time to add an additional Olympic gold at the 2022 Beijing Games. Her nationality switch followed a public dispute with Bobsleigh Canada over allegations of mistreatment, and Humphries's eventual naturalization as a US citizen and her subsequent 2022 Olympic gold for Team USA made her one of the few Olympic athletes to win gold medals for two different countries in the same sport. Humphries's combination of technical driving precision and sustained success across three different Olympics, competing for two separate national teams, reflects a level of adaptability and continued elite performance that few bobsled athletes have matched across a career spanning such significant institutional upheaval. Her combined three Olympic gold medals across three separate Games, achieved while representing two different countries, make Humphries one of the most statistically dominant and genuinely unusual champions in the history of women's bobsled.

• Steven Holcomb

  Steven Holcomb piloted the American four-man bobsled team to Olympic gold at the 2010 Vancouver Games, ending a 62-year American gold medal drought in the event that had persisted since the 1948 St. Moritz Olympics, making it one of the most significant American bobsled achievements in Olympic history. His personal story included overcoming a degenerative eye disease, keratoconus, that had left him nearly legally blind and threatened to end his competitive driving career entirely before an experimental corrective surgical procedure restored his vision enough to continue competing at the elite level. Holcomb's condition and his subsequent recovery became a significant part of his public story, and his eventual Olympic gold, achieved after a period when doctors had suggested his competitive career might be over, added particular resonance to America's long-awaited return to bobsled's top step of the podium. His death in 2017 at 37, attributed to a combination of sleep medication and alcohol, ended the career of one of American bobsled's most significant pilots, and Holcomb's 2010 gold remains one of the most celebrated individual achievements in the history of US Olympic bobsled.

• Vonetta Flowers

  Vonetta Flowers won Olympic gold in the two-woman bobsled event at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, becoming the first Black athlete in history to win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics, a historic breakthrough given the Winter Games' historically limited participation and representation of Black athletes. Flowers came to bobsled after a career as a competitive track and field athlete, a common pathway into the sport given bobsled's heavy reliance on explosive sprinting speed during a sled's initial push-off, and her transition from summer to winter sport reflected a path several successful bobsledders have followed. Her Olympic gold, won as the brakeman pushing for pilot Jill Bakken, came in just the second Olympics at which women's bobsled was included as a medal event, giving Flowers's historic breakthrough additional significance during the sport's still-developing modern women's competitive era. Flowers's historic gold medal made her a significant and celebrated figure in the broader conversation about diversity in winter sports, and her achievement remains one of the most historically significant individual moments in the history of Black athletes' participation in the Winter Olympics.