Fearon and Douglas boost British bobsleigh ranks for the season ahead

Back in July Fearon became the joint-third fastest British man of all time when he ran 9.96 seconds at the English Athletics Championships – the quickest time by a Brit in 2016.

That came just five months after he finished fourth alongside Bruce Tasker in the two-man competition at the Bobsleigh World Championships in Austria.

Fearon will be going for a two-pronged attack this season with the Bobsleigh World Championships in Sochi, in February, while the global athletics gathering takes place on home soil at the Olympic Stadium in London, next summer.

But his decision to remain as part of the GB Bobsleigh set up, with one eye on the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, is one that has pleased performance director Gary Anderson.

The British team has also managed to recruit former British 100m record holder and Beijing 2008 Olympian Montell Douglas to the women's squad, leaving Anderson with plenty of reasons for optimism for the season ahead.

"To be able to recruit another top British athlete in Montell less than a year after Mark Lewis-Francis joined the programme is a huge boost, as is keeping hold of Joel after his stunning summer on the athletics track," said Anderson, who has also added Welsh sprinter Mica Moore, England Rugby Sevens international Sam Blanchet and Belgrave Harrier Greg Cackett to his team this term.

"We are genuinely excited about what lies ahead this season. This is undoubtedly the strongest squad we have had in my time as performance director and it's another example of how far we have come in the past six years.

"Last season we achieved our best two-man result in a World Championships for half a century and we were agonisingly close to a first World Championship medal since 1939 in the four-man event.

"We have put strong foundations in place and now our job is to build on those as we head towards what we hope will be a medal-winning Winter Olympics in 2018."

Sportsbeat 2016