Why Is the Winter Sport Called “Bobsledding”?

It’s one of the wildest and fastest-paced of all the Winter Olympic disciplines. But what exactly is a bobsled? 

The bobsled, or bobsleigh, emerged as a winter sport in the late 1800s, initially as a fairly relaxed and impromptu downhill sledding race in the winter resorts of Switzerland. As it became more popular, however, a more formalized sport and racing events began to emerge, and the sport’s international governing body—the IBSF, or International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation—was founded in 1923.

Origins of the Word

Understandably, the “sled” or “sleigh” in a bobsled or bobsleigh is the same carriage-like wintertime transport that Santa Claus is said to travel around in. Both words are thought to take their name from Dutch, but can be traced back to the Germanic roots of many of the languages of northwest Europe, to a distant relative of the word slide.

The “bob” in bobsled, however, is a far more curious and more mysterious word whose origins are a lot more difficult to pin down. 

According to the IBSF themselves, the name bobsled was coined way back in the early days of the sport, in reference to the “bobbing” back and forth of the sled’s team members. These movements, the IBSF claims, were a means of increasing the sled’s speed as the team made their way down the course. 

But not everyone is convinced of that theory, however, and in its place a handful of other ideas have been thrown forward. Rather than referring to the bobbing motion of the sled itself, for instance, an alternative theory claims that the “bob” here is a noun, not a verb, and perhaps refers to the rounded supports or “bobs” that the sleds sat upon.

This would put bobsled and bobsleigh in the same class of words as a bob haircut, all of which can be traced back to the older use of the word bob to refer to anything formed or cut down into a single, shortened, or compacted mass. (The bobcat would also fall in this category of words, as it is so named on account of its noticeably short or “bobbed” tail.) 

The most likely theory here, however, is that the “bob” in bobsled is indeed a verb—although it likely did not refer to the “bobbing” back and forth of the team members, but to the “bobbing” up and down of the sled itself as it was hauled across presumably bumpy or difficult terrain. 

Contrary to the IBSF’s theory, the earliest known record of the word bobsled dates back to the late 1700s, when a bobsled was the name of a specific type of short, low-lying sled, typically drawn by horses, that was used to carry logs, machinery, and other heavy loads in the logging and agricultural industries of 18th century America.

In this context, the word has been dated back as far as 1796 by the Oxford English Dictionary, which has unearthed an early reference to a “bob-sled, or single ox or horse sled” in a document from New Brunswick, Canada. 

It would be almost another century before the sport of bobsledding as we know it today first began to emerge, and so we can be fairly sure the sport simply took its name from the pre-existing sled that it utilized, and so had nothing to do with the movements of the teammates inside. 

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