History of Para Bobsled & Skeleton
Para sliding sport traces its roots to Park City, Utah. In the winter of 2002, two American athletes — Aaron Lanningham and Gary Kuhl — did what no adaptive athletes had done before: they piloted bobsleds from the very top of an Olympic track. Backed by Utah’s National Ability Center, their runs proved that the world’s fastest ice was not off-limits. Kuhl went on to earn an official pilot’s license and lined up against able-bodied competitors on the North American circuit, setting a precedent that still defines the sport: sliders are sliders.
International momentum arrived in 2010, when the International Bobsleigh & Skeleton Federation threw its full support behind para sport and formed a dedicated committee with one goal in sight — the Paralympic Winter Games. The United States again played a central role: USA Bobsled and Skeleton hosted the first international para driving school in the 2011/2012 season, welcoming seventeen athletes from six nations to learn the craft.
Equipment evolved alongside the athlete pool. In 2012, the Swiss debuted the first purpose-built para monobob in St. Moritz, a design that became the sport’s standard sled. Five years later, the Launcher start device made its public debut at the World Championships, further opening the sport to athletes with a wide range of impairments.
Competition history was made in Sigulda, Latvia in 2013, when the sport held its first recognized international event. By 2014 the International Paralympic Committee had formally recognized the IBSF, making para bobsled and para skeleton candidate sports for the Paralympic program, and the first official Para World Cup season launched that winter in Innsbruck.
In 2016 the sport came home: Park City — where it all began — hosted the inaugural Para Sport World Championships. That same season, American Dawn Macomber broke new ground as the first woman to race in a Para World Cup, a milestone made possible by one of the sport’s distinctive features: women and men compete head-to-head in para bobsleigh.
The sport reached another landmark in 2023, when St. Moritz staged the first World Championships to feature para and able-bodied athletes competing at the same event — a full-circle moment for a discipline built on the belief that the ice belongs to everyone.
Today, Team USA’s para bobsled and skeleton athletes compete across the World Cup circuit, carrying forward a legacy that started with two Americans at the top of the Park City track — and pushing toward the sport’s ultimate goal: full inclusion in the Paralympic Winter Games.
