From Jamaica's toughest neighbourhoods to the Winter Olympics: This is Nimroy Turgott’s amazing story

Jamaican bobsledder Nimroy Turgott triumphed over significant adversity to take his place at Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

Turgott is from August Town, Kingston - one of the toughest and most deprived areas on the Caribbean island where gang murders and other criminal activity are the norm. Trouble on the streets was almost unavoidable for Turgott and his friends. But that's not all.

Growing up, he contracted an illness that meant he lost large parts of his memory. He struggled to complete the simplest of tasks in the classroom.

“I couldn’t even spell the word ‘if’ in fifth grade,” he told Olympics.com.

“People even started calling me 'If'. But I got away with it because of my sporting abilities.”

The boy with memory loss was the fastest runner in his school, which in Jamaica is a serious achievement.

Turgott joined the prestigious MVP Track & Field Club to develop his talent. He would go on to set a personal best 100m time of 10.13 seconds and even trained with former world record holder Asafa Powell.

After running at the Jamaican national trials in 2017, Jamaica Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation President Nelson "Chris" Stokes - who competed in the four-man sled at Calgary 1988 and whose journey was immortalised by the film Cool Runnings - asked Turgott to try his sport.

“I wasn’t interested at first because I was doing pretty well in track and field, but then I thought to myself, ‘this is an opportunity to represent Jamaica’ - and I couldn’t turn it down,” the Turgott revealed.

“It also helped that I had a high school and university teammate who had already joined the [Jamaican bobsleigh] team in Carrie Russell who was doing very well.

“I flew to Whistler, and the next day I was in a bobsleigh. The experience was