McNeill & Douglas 13th at halfway
Mica McNeill and Montell Douglas will go into the second day of the women’s bobsleigh World Championships in 13th position after Saturday night’s first two runs in Whistler.
The British pair clocked a combined time of 1 minute 46.75 seconds across the first half of the four-run race at the showpiece event of the season.
They are currently 0.22 seconds off the top 10 in a race that featured no fewer than three crashes on the fastest track in the world.
Starting ninth of 19 sleds first time around, they clocked 53.37 seconds off a 5.30 start to sit 13th at the end of Run 1. They improved their start time by four hundredths on route to recording an almost identical downtime in Run 2 to maintain that position ahead of tomorrow’s final two runs.
McNeill, who was eighth at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea 12 months ago, has a World Championship best of 12th in her four previous appearances, while Douglas is competing in her first World Champs.
They have a season’s World Cup best of fourth from Altenberg at the start of the year but haven’t raced together since mid-January after Douglas was sidelined with an ankle injury.
Germany’s reigning Olympic Champion, Mariama Jamanka, leads by 13 hundredths of a second from America’s Elana Meyers Taylor, who has won two of the last three World Championships. Jamanka’s team-mate Stephanie Schneider occupies the bronze medal position, 0.34 seconds behind Meyers Taylor and the same distance in front of Canada’s Christine De Bruin.
Runs 3 and 4 take place at 7.30pm GMT on Sunday, with the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation broadcasting live on their website and YouTube channel.
