Real story behind Cool Runnings and Jamaican bobsleigh team involving CIA, John Barnes and Queen Camilla’s ex

‘Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, it’s bobsled time!’

Cool Runnings gives one of the most iconic moments in Winter Olympics history the Hollywood treatment, and yet the real story arguably makes for a much better film.

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It stars Prince Albert of Monaco, the CIA, John Barnes, Camilla Parker-Bowles’ ex-husband, the Grenada invasion and a reggae singer who didn’t actually sing any reggae.

The real story behind Cool Runnings

As per the Disney classic, a Jamaican sprinter who was disqualified from the Games helps form his country’s first bobsleigh team.

Enlisting the help of a disgraced American bobsledder, the four athletes overcome all odds to reach the 1988 Winter Olympics.

However, George Fitch, the man who actually co-founded the team, has famously claimed only one per cent of Cool Runnings is true.

Chinese-born American Fitch, a former mayor of Virginia, had extensive ties to the Caribbean during the Reagan Administration.

He was in charge of the Caribbean Basin Initiative, an organisation which is directly linked to the 1983 United States invasion of Grenada.

Fitch met Colonel Ken Barnes, father of Liverpool legend John Barnes, who led the Caribbean forces when the US invaded the island nation.

The latter joined Jon Norman and Jarrod Kimber on the talkSPORT Daily podcast in 2020 for a deep dive into Cool Runnings’ origin.

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Role of John Barnes’ father

79-cap England international Barnes Jr said of his dad: “He was born in Trinidad, but to join the British West Indies Regiment as an army officer, as he was back then, anybody from any of the Caribbean islands, Trinidad, Barbados, Guyana, anywhere had to go to Jamaica, because that is where the British West Indies Army was based.

“So he went to Jamaica, joined the British West Indies Regiment, came to Sandhurst to become a British army officer, because, of course, it was still in colonial times.

“He was actually there with Camilla’s husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. He was the best man at my father’s wedding.

“And of course, when he went back to Jamaica after being at Sandhurst, when Jamaica became independent, he then became an officer in the Jamaican army.

“But he felt, being from the Caribbean, being black in the 50s, coming into the establishment at Sandhurst, he knows that he’s going to be judged. So therefore, he volunteered for everything.

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“We know what things are like in terms of racial bias, so he felt he just had to throw himself into everything.

“And he was already sporty, playing football and cricket, so he just felt that if I put my mind to boxing or to rugby and I’m a sportsman, I’m able to do it.”

That mentality formed the basis of Fitch’s thinking that athletes in Jamaica should be talented enough to compete in any Olympic sport.

Having watched the country’s annual push cart derby in the Blue Mountains, he deemed that sprinters could become bobsleigh stars.

John Barnes explained: “So when this whole idea of the bobsled team came up, what actually happened was the guy who John Candy played, the real man, came to Jamaica.

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“He’d been coming to Jamaica. He knew that Jamaicans were good athletes. So he knew that because we’ve got good sprinters, that’s what the bobsled is all about, the start.

“So if you can get good sprinters, he can coach them to be in the bobsled team.

“He came to my father because what he wanted, he also wanted discipline, because, of course, in terms of training and things like that, he knew that they had to be disciplined people.

“So he came to my father, and he said he wants four army officers to be the Jamaica bobsled team. And my dad said to him, ‘You can’t just choose army officers’.

“You have to have open trials for everybody because you can’t come and decide that you want army officers.”

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Cool Runnings, being a comedy film, chose to omit Barnes Sr and the army’s role from their version, with Barnes Jr adding: “The thing about it is that it was a comedy and it’s a film. That’s not the culture of Jamaica.

“There was one Jamaican actor and the rest were American. And it was a comedy.

“That is not a representation of Jamaica in any way, shape or form. It was just a film. That is a great film, a funny film. But it showed some nice images of Jamaica.

“It was not a political statement, because I suppose if you then say this man is going to come to Jamaica and say he wants four army officers because he doesn’t believe that the Jamaicans are disciplined enough, I don’t think that that would have come down too well.

“So he didn’t feel offended that George Fitch came and said that, you know, he feels that he wants disciplined Jamaicans rather than just good, athletic Jamaicans.

“So that could not have been put in the film. I don’t even think I should be telling this story now, to be honest.”

Ken Barnes decided Jamaica needed someone with good hand-eye coordination to steer the sled and a helicopter pilot was chosen.

That man was Dudley Stokes, who said: “George Fitch was actually in Jamaica because he worked for the CIA, and that was his posting.

“And he started a company called IOP. One of the company’s ideas was a Jamaica bobsled team. So that tells you a bit about George Fitch.

“Well, he was an entrepreneurial character, the kind of person that would go to lengths to get things to happen.”

Fitch’s father had served with the OSS, with talkSPORT’s Kimber having a memorable exchange with the CIA to confirm Stokes’ claim.

“I was like, well, clearly he’s in the CIA. She goes, ‘It’s beginning to sound like that.’ So now even the CIA is thinking he’s in the CIA.”

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Stokes’ brother Chris proved to be a late replacement for the team, with the pair joining Mike White, Freddy Powell, and Devon Harris.

Cool Runnings depicted a ragtag team of misfits who had barely trained before the Olympics, with the reality much different.

On the first day of the Jamaican bobsleigh trials, Harris recalled: “We all met at the National Stadium in Kingston, and they took us to a room atop the stadium and showed us the Lycra, speed suits and the ice spikes that the bobsled athletes run around in.

“I remember holding it and really fine teeth and I cut myself on it. So I got injured even before I ever saw a bobsled.

“But yeah, then they showed footage of these crashes and they were spectacular, man.

‘If I die, I die’

“There were crashes where the sleds were flying out of the track and ended up in trees and just really crazy stuff. And there was one where the bodies were strewn along the track, blood everywhere. And the driver said it was like 10 meters up the track, right?

“It was decapitated. And I remember sitting there wondering to myself, what the hell am I getting myself into?

“Then there were maybe 40 people in the room and the next day only about 20 turned up. The others were obviously far more sensible than I was.

Harris added: “Certainly for me, as I was trying to get myself to go down the track on that first run, I just resigned myself.

“I just said, ‘Hey, if I die, I die.’ But I’m going, because there was no way I was going to go back to Jamaica, not going down this thing.”

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Help from Prince Albert

Fitch used $92,000 (£56,000) of his own money to fund training, with ex-American bobsleigh athlete Howard Siler drafted in as coach.

10 days before the Olympics, the IOC looked to ban Jamaica from the bobsleigh event, but Prince Albert of Monaco intervened.

Devon Harris told talkSPORT: “And Albert, who I tell him that he’s the coolest prince I know.

“He obviously was a bobsledder and at the time a member of the IOC as well. And he kind of leaned in and said, ‘Hey, give the guys a chance.’ And so we thank him for that. Absolutely.”

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How the Jamaican bobsled team went into four-man

Sam Clayton, who died from coronavirus aged 58 in 2020, was the second Jamaican driver for a planned dual two-man event entry.

However, his exit from camp saw the rest of the team convince Fitch to enter a four-man team for the Calgary Games.

“George said, ‘We’ll borrow a four-man in Lake Placid and let’s see how you go,'” Dudley Stokes revealed.

“It went well, fairly well, except that on the last day, I hit the walls so hard on the exit of the finish curve that it destroyed the sled.

“So that also inspired the scene in the movie where the Canadians lent us a sled that they forgot they had.”

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Cool Runnings’ iconic ‘walk’ never happened

Dudley Stokes and White famously struck the ninth corner in the four-man event and flipped the sled in what was a huge crash.

Cool Runnings depicts the quartet carrying the sled triumphantly over their head in one of the most famous scenes in the movie.

Yet talkSPORT’s Kimber added: “That did not happen at all.

“These guys were broken by what happened emotionally, luckily for them, rather than physically. You can see them.

“They trudged to the end of the track. I think Devon Harris stopped to high-five a couple of people. But his heart wasn’t in the high fives.

“He was broken. So they felt completely like failures. But Jamaica didn’t see them that way. And neither did the rest of the world.”