Montrealers may have pointed toboggans downhill on the famous Tuque Bleue slide in the 1870s, but it was the Swiss who later attached a steering mechanism to the toboggan and gave birth to the sport of bobsleigh. In 1897 the world's first bobsleigh club was founded in St. Moritz, Switzerland and by 1914 more than 100 natural-ice courses of varying degrees of sophistication could be found at winter resorts throughout alpine Europe.
Canada's first bobsleigh run was built in 1911 at Montebello, Quebec by Swiss ski instructor Emile Cochand, who also developed the country's first ski resort. Although bobsleigh was one of the original sports at the first Winter Olympics in 1924, it wasn't until the late 1950's that Canadian bobsledders began competing internationally. At the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, a Canadian team led by Vic Emery set the European bobsleigh powers on their collective ear, winning the gold medal in the four-man event in what one Canadian coach of the time called "the biggest upset in Olympic bobsleigh history."
The opening of the Canada Olympic Park track in Calgary in 1986 was an important milestone in the development of both national and international programs in women's bobsleigh. It wasn't long before women began to take an interest in the sliding sport. Sue Calvert and Sigi Feuser were among the first women to compete in national championships against the men. That they were slower didn't matter: what mattered was the experience they acquired and the trail they blazed for others to follow.