Addition of monobob event brings new wrinkle to bobsleigh at Beijing Olympics

A new discipline is sliding into the bobsleigh track at the Beijing Olympics.

Women's monobob — a single-woman sled event — joins the two-man, two-woman and four-man races at the Olympics, helping to narrow the gender gap and increase the excitement at the National Sliding Centre in Yanqing, a district of Beijing.

Canada earned two entries in monobob, with Cynthia Appiah and Christine de Bruin, ranked third and fourth in the discipline, respectively, setting their eyes on the podium.

Appiah, 31, won four medals on the monobob World Series this season, split evenly between silver and bronze.

The Toronto-born athlete is making her Olympic debut after serving as an alternate brakeman at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games — something she told CBC News was a motivating factor in her career after she expected to be on the main roster.

The 32-year-old de Bruin, meanwhile, reached only half as many podiums as Appiah on the season — but she made them count, taking gold in back-to-back races in December and January.

Beijing will mark her second Olympics as a pilot after finishing seventh in the two-woman alongside brakeman Melissa Lotholtz, who now pilots her own sled, in Pyeongchang.

Appiah and de Bruin's biggest competition in monobob will come in the form of two Americans: top-ranked Elana Meyers Taylor and second-ranked Kaillie Humphries. Both Americans tested positive for COVID-19 ahead of these Olympics, but were eventually cleared to compete.

WATCH | Humphries edges Appiah in World Cup monobob race:

Meyers Taylor is a force, ranking first in monobob thanks to four gold medals and one silver.

But it's Humphries that commands the attention. The 36-year-old, born in Calgary, competed for Canada at each of the last three Winter