Robin Seel

Robin Seel excelled as a skeleton racer on the Cresta Run in the 1960s, and had it been an Olympic event at the time he would surely have won a medal. As it was, he did compete at the 1964 Innsbruck Games as a member of the Great Britain 2-man bobsleigh crew and for three of the four runs they were faster than their number one bob, only to be pipped into 13th place by their compatriots at the end of the fourth run.

Seel´s father Roland won the Military Cross and was, like his son, a toboggan/skeleton exponent, with the pair often racing against each other. Robin attended Cranleigh school, Surrey, where he played rugby, before going to Grenoble University, France. He served as an officer in the 11th Hussars for more than five years between 1959-64. After the Army, Seel worked as a sales engineer before becoming a dairy farmer until the 1980s when he founded Barriers International, a company that designed and manufactured a variety of sports fencing and barriers for use at many different sporting events.

As a skeleton racer, Seel enjoyed a lot of success and won some of the Cresta Run´s best-known events, notably the Bott Cup in 1960 and the Heaton Cup two years later when he beat the legendary Nino Bibbia into second place as he became the first Englishman since 1947 to win the trophy. Seel competed in the 1966 European Two-man Bobsleigh Championship and finished ninth. His brakeman was Prince Michael of Kent, a member of the British Royal Family and a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.