BEN SIMONS
British Bobsleigh Athlete
About Ben
Ben Simons returned to the British Bobsleigh fold in the summer of 2025 after three years away from the sport.
Simons retired after going to his third Olympic Winter Games as the reserve athlete for Brad Hall's 4-man crew in Beijing in 2022 but he is now pushing for a slot in the GB1 team again as he targets a fourth Games in Milan Cortina in February.
Ben represented Team GB at both Sochi 2014 and PyeongChang 2018, placing 19th alongside Lamin Deen, John Baines and Andrew Matthews in Russia and 18th with Deen, Matthews and Toby Olubi in South Korea four years later.
He finished fifth at the 2015 World Championships in Winterberg with Deen, Matthews and Bruce Tasker and, until his initial retirement, hadn’t missed a global showpiece event since his World Champs debut in St Moritz in 2013. He has featured at a total of seven World Championships, with his most recent coming in Altenberg in January 2021.
Ben won an historic World Cup gold medal in Whistler in November 2017 as he, Deen, Matthews and Olubi set the then fastest-ever recorded speed for a bobsleigh as they reached 97mph on route to the country's first men's World Cup gold since the mid 1980s.
With over 120 race appearances to his name (of which 73 have come in either the World Cup, Winter Olympics or World Championships), Ben is now one of the country's most experienced bobsledders.
He was part of the Accelerated Driver Programme alongside Tasker and Hall and competed as a pliot and a brakeman in 2015/16, before opting to concentrate on pushing rather than driving a sled prior to the PyeongChang Olympics.
Ben joined British Bobsleigh in 2012 after seeing a Talent ID poster on a noticeboard at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC, now Cardiff Metropolitan).
An avid skier, Ben comes from an athletics background, having initially specialised in the long jump and triple jump while competing for Telford Athletics Club. He concentrated predominantly on sprinting during his time at UWIC, winning the Welsh Championships over 60m and representing Wales at both the 100m and the 4x100m relay.