Engineer by day, bobsledder by night: Ottawa’s Mike Evelyn is off to the Olympics

Christopher Spring, Cody Sorensen, Samuel Giguere and Mike Evelyn, of Canada, celebrate after the 4-man heat 2 at the 2022 Winter Olympics, Saturday, Feb. 19, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Ottawa native Mike Evelyn will be blazing past TV screens as he represents Team Canada at the Olympic Games later this month.

Evelyn is a member of Canada’s bobsleigh team and will competing at the Milano Cortina Winter Games. While the Olympics are set to begin on Friday, Feb. 6, for Evelyn, who’s an engineer at a local software company by day, the long-awaited journey will start this weekend when he flies out to Italy.

“We sort of toil in obscurity for three years and eleven months and then we come to the limelight for the Olympics, so its really exciting for us,” he told 580 CFRA’s Ottawa at Work with Patricia Boal on Thursday.

This will be Evelyn’s second time representing Canada at the Olympics. In 2022, he competed in Beijing, placing seventh in the two-man event, and ninth in the four-man. Evelyn will be competing in both events again this February.

He says the competition will be stiff, but there are reasons for optimism.

“We didn’t have too much success in the two-man event this year, but we’ve got an up-and-coming pilot, Jay Dearborn, so I’ll be sliding with him in the two-man event,” he said.

Evelyn says the four-man event is where the team found most success this season.

“We had our best result of the year in the last race of the season. In Altenberg, we came sixth, so we’re a little more exciting for four-man,” he said. “We think we could have a real result there.”

‘I was looking for the next thing’

Evelyn spent five seasons playing hockey for Dalhousie University before getting into the sport of bobsleigh. Evelyn is a product of the RBC Training Ground talent identification program.

“They go coast-to-coast-to-coast, in various cities across Canada and they perform basic sport testing similar to a combine you’d see for football. How high can you jump? How fast can you run?” he said.

After impressing at an initial round of testing, Evelyn was invited out to a second tryout which featured recruiters from different national sporting programs, including rowing, cycling, and of course, bobsleigh.

Prior to the program, Evelyn had no experience in bobsleigh but caught the attention of recruiters.

“I was definitely taken back. I had seen ‘Cool Runnings,’ but that was about the extent of it,” he said.

“My hockey career had come to an end, and I was looking for the next thing, and this was the opportunity. So, I was pretty excited at the idea that sport might not be over for me.”

Fast forward seven years, and the hockey player-turned-bobsledder is about to become a two-time Olympian and Evelyn encourages others to try their shot at the RBC Training Grounds.

“It’s a really amazing program. It’s available to youth from age 14 to 25,” he said, adding that there’s an event in Ottawa on April 11 at the University of Ottawa.

“I recommend everybody from that age range go out and show their stuff.”

‘It gets really complicated, really quickly’

As Evelyn explains, bobsled is rife with technical aspects, from the build of the track to the make and preparation of the sled — an especially fitting sport for an engineer.

“It seems really simple on the surface, and then as you dig down, it gets really complicated really quickly,’ he said.

“Anybody who’s involved in building race machines will tell you its really not simple even though there’s very few parts and lots of restrictions about how they can be put together.”

According to Evelyn, there’s been so much innovation in the sport, that there are now rules restricting it. The tracks, many of which were built in the seventies, weren’t made to support the speeds of some modern sleds, he says.

“Tracks that would once have had a reputation of being easy to make it down, in recent years, we’re seeing a lot more crashes because the sleds are going so much faster because of all this innovation,” he said.

“It’s an interesting problem to have. You want to make the sleds better, you want to make the sleds faster, you want to make the sport more exciting, but safety becomes harder and harder to ensure as the sleds get faster.”

The athletic component is also full of nuance.

It all begins with the team’s push, which Evelyn says is essentially an all-out sprint with some resistance.

“You start pushing the sled on ice,” he said. “It’s a little like running the 100 metres but you’ve got some resistance, and then as the sled starts going downhill, you start running faster than you could run on flat ground.”

Then, the entire team must orchestrate their way into the sled — ideally in less than a second — and tuck in for the ride. From there, the team’s fate is in the hands of the sled’s pilot.

“You’re hoping that everything goes well. Then, when you cross the finish line, the guy at the back pulls the brakes.”

The race down the track usually lasts about one minute, and Evelyn says he’ll have plenty of family and friends in Italy cheering him on.

“I have 23 people coming,” he said. “My wife Erin and tons of friends and family are coming to watch.”

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