From the diving board to the bobsleigh track: Yohan Eskrick-Parkinson’s unusual journey into sliding

Bobsleigh is a sport known for augmenting its ranks with athletes who transition in from other sport backgrounds. Often, these athletes come from sports like rugby, football, or athletics, which have somewhat of a clear line towards bobsleigh with the pushing and sprinting skills required for sliding.

But Yohan Eskrick-Parkinson’s path to the Canadian national bobsleigh team has been a less travelled route—one that started on a diving springboard, and led him to some of the highest levels of competition that the sport has to offer. But one quick comment from two-time Olympic medallist in bobsleigh, Lascelles Brown, changed the course of Eskrick-Parkinson’s athletic career.

Just a few months after his first time in a sled, Eskrick-Parkinson was named a member of the national team, pushing the sled behind pilot and Beijing 2022 Olympian, Taylor Austin. After two events on the developmental North American Cup circuit in November, Eskrick-Parkinson made it to the big leagues, making his World Cup debut in January. 

Olympic.ca chatted with Eskrick-Parkinson midway through his first season on the IBSF World Cup circuit to hear more about how he’s adapting from the finesse of diving to the raw power of bobsleigh, and what edge his unusual sport background gives him.

Let’s start with your journey into diving. How did you get into that sport?

I got into diving when I was about seven years old. I actually just got asked to try the sport because I wasn’t afraid of heights! I was at the Lindsay Park Centre in Calgary, where they have a dive tank. I was jumping off the platform and a coach saw me and was like, “Hey, you should try this out!” I did some summer camps and just stuck with it.

What were some of your highlights of your career in diving?

I’d say the first big step for me out of high school was getting the chance to dive at Northwestern University in Chicago. It’s a [NCAA] Division I team, and it was great to spend four years there. 

I had anticipated going straight into academics after, and retiring from diving. Then I think when I was halfway through university, I had a coach say, “You know, if you can, you should keep going—the ceiling is still high.” And it turned out that I had the chance to dive for Team Jamaica. 

Right after university, I started training with [Jamaican diver] Yona Knight-Wisdom. We went to the Pan American Games, Central American and Caribbean Games, and did two World [Aquatics] Championships and a bunch of World Cups together. I think our best placement in the synchronized three metre event was 13th at [2024] world champs, which is just amazing. I never thought I’d be able to say that I was that level at anything in the world. 

In Qatar, the last world championships, we were five spots off of qualifying for the Olympics. So it was tight. It was really cool to have the chance to fight for that.

How did the transition to bobsleigh come about?

I trained for the last years of my diving career in Scotland, but when I was back in Calgary for the summer, I had a weights coach who was a former bobsledder—Lascelles Brown. I was training with him one day, and I remember I was on the stairs and I was practicing some jumps. I jumped like eight steps from standing, and Lascelles looked at me and was like, “You know, maybe you should try bobsleigh.”

That was about two years ago. And then once I retired from diving, I reached out to him and got started in bobsleigh in July.

What was the experience like trying bobsleigh for the first time?

When we started in the summer, the only chance for me to practice was in the Ice House in Calgary. There’s a ramp that goes down, and back up, and as a brakeman, that’s my job; it’s all I needed to do to train really. So I did that for about five months. I found that pretty exciting. 

They kind of just throw you into that. I showed up, and Melissa Lotholz, who is currently [a pilot] on the [national] team right now, she was the coach at the time—I didn’t know I’d be her teammate two months later! But she was coaching me, and she’s like, “All right, all you’ve got to do is push this and then get in like this.” And I thought, “Okay, I can do this.” You’ve just got to kind of have that raw athleticism to jump onto something that’s moving fast. 

The first time I went down [a full track] was in October, in Whistler, and that was the first time I really felt the pressures and turns. And that was when I was like, “All right, this is crazy!”

What do you feel like you’re bringing with you from diving that’s helpful for bobsleigh? And what’s feeling brand new?

I think, for me, the transition has been a bit interesting because in comparison to a lot of other athletes who are starting out in bobsleigh this year, I have a different background. A lot of athletes are football players or baseball or sports that tend to involve running. 

[In diving], it’s all jumping, so I have that explosive power, but to really figure out the technique for sprinting down the ice and pushing the sled is different. So I’ve been really leaning into that, working on it hard. 

And then I think something that’s been easy, is the fast twitch muscle type of ability. That’s what made me a strong diver. I wanted to just jump as high as I could off that board because it impresses the judges. And then now in bobsleigh, it’s hopefully going to show off in the push.

How would you describe your season thus far, now that you’ve gotten to experience some World Cup racing?

Training for this, I was well aware that the competition was going to be very difficult. We’re talking about people who have been in the sport for years, and I’m in my first year. So, it’s been challenging, of course, in that regard, trying to keep up with these guys. But I’m learning very fast, and it’s kind of like trial by fire.

It’s kind of interesting being an underdog in this, considering that I know how to compete mentally—I know what it takes and how to handle the pressure. But doing it in this sport is also different, right? Diving is a very controlled and thought-out process, whereas in bobsleigh, you kind of get out there and just think “I gotta move this as fast as I can.” It’s just 100% strength. If I went 100% strength and power in diving, I’d fail a dive, because that’s just not how to do it. So dialing that in is really cool. 

What are your goals for the rest of the season, and then in the training towards next season as well?

A big goal for me in this last bit of the season is to take every chance that I push and give it everything I’ve got. 

I’m really hoping to compete at world champs. I’d love to be on a sled there. I think it’d be really amazing to go back-to-back, with a summer sport world champs and then a winter sport world champs, and represent at that level, and at least get a taste of what the Olympics might feel like next year, if I’m able to qualify for that. 

Once that’s done with, no matter how the season goes, I’m going to be back home training in the spring and going back to square one. I want to work on every basic. 

What is the team dynamic like? You competed in synchro diving, so having a team sport dynamic is not new for you, but how is this environment different?

I think it’s the nature of the sport, but [bobsleigh] is a lot higher energy. We’re hyping each other up, and it’s very intense while getting ready to go. In diving, you want to keep things a little bit more calm and controlled, but strong. 

The program is going through a bit of a rebuild right now, and I think that’s why we have so many new athletes coming in to take the opportunity and see where we can get to. And I think that’s cool, because it means that maybe two years down the line, or six years down the line, for some of us, we’ll be able to say “Look at how far we came from!” 

Rapid fire with Yohan Eskrick-Parkinson

Who’s an athlete you look up to?

I really look up to Yona Knight-Wisdom, my [diving] teammate. He’s just a very smart athlete in the way that he trains. I lived and trained with him for two years, so I really got to know him well and look up to him a lot. A lot of things that he said to me, I’m finding they resonate more and more each day that I’m still at this level of sport. 

And then I also really want to give a shout out to the [bobsleigh] mentors in the program and outside of the program, who’ve been helping us. We have a crazy history of bobsledders in Canada, and a lot of them are still involved, or are still available to speak to—Lascelles Brown, Jesse Lumsden, Neville [Wright]—everyone has been a huge help with coming back and giving us pointers here and there when they can.

Favorite bobsleigh memory so far?

Oh, probably the first run! My first one in Whistler was crazy, because that is the fastest track in the world. So you’re kind of like “All right, well, at least it can’t get worse than this!” 

I remember I jumped in the sled, and I was like, “Okay, it’s fine. It’s bumpy.” And I was like, “Oh, it’s gonna get way crazier, isn’t it?” Corner one, corner two, we picked up speed, and I laughed out loud—I audibly laughed—and Taylor [Austin], my pilot, I think it threw him off a bit. He said he never heard anyone laugh.

Any pre-race rituals or routines?

A really key one is visualization. That was huge for diving, where you’re doing something that takes one and a half seconds, but it’s like 1000 movements, so you’ve kind of got to slow time down in your head and tune into all your senses and visualize. Every day I’m at the track and I’m sliding, I’ll be doing that before I go. And then music to bring the vibe and the energy to perform!