Who was the Bob whose name is immortalized in Olympic sport of bobsled?

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Sometimes two people, sometimes four, push their sled frantically from the start line and jump in to descend a hair raising bobsled course; only occasionally is one of their names Robert.

So why is bobsled (or bobsleigh) named Bob?

The sled part is easy.

Sled comes from a Germanic root related to “slide.” Sleds slide on slippery slopes.

I found one folk etymology about why a bobsled is called a bobsled.

The theory there is that when the athletes are working to get the thing going faster they bob their heads.

The problem with this theory is that the word bobsled predates any organized sport with this name. The first documented mention of a bobsled was in 1839 while the first organized races were held in the 1890s.

It is the context of the first citation of the word bobsled that gives us a clue to who or what bob is or was.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the original bobsleds were not used for sport but for logging. Two short sleds were attached one behind the other.

To drag logs from the bush it’s safe to assume that the ground over which the load had to be hauled was pretty uneven despite being compacted and frozen with ice and snow. A long sled would be constantly twisted and straining as it moved over the uneven ground and under a load of logs something was quite likely to break.

The solution was to have a short pair of runners on a leading sled tied to a second similar pair of runners behind. Then as the vehicle twisted itself over the bumpy terrain, the front and rear sleds could move independently reducing the likelihood of damage.

The modern racing bobsleds are similarly fitted with a pair of runners at the front and a second pair at the back.

The runners themselves were called bobs in 1857 and my suspicion is that the reason is the same as the reason a kind of haircut is called a bob and why a horse whose tail is cut short is said to have it bobbed.

The bobsled was a short sled.