Tucked into the Mount Van Hoevenberg Sports Complex outside the village of Lake Placid is a workshop run solely by Marc Van Den Berg, who spends countless hours constructing bobsleds. 

Van Den Berg, the director of technology and equipment for USA Bobsled/Skeleton, constructed the bobsleds Team USA will use to compete in the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy this week, starting on Sunday with the women’s monobob — an event where one woman races down an ice track in a bobsled with no brakeman.

“It’s very exciting,” Van Den Berg said. “Team USA has a big chance for winning medals now, because our equipment is so up to date. And it’s all built in Lake Placid.”

The bobsleds were shipped in massive containers flown from New York to Europe: two men’s two-man sleds, two men’s four-man sleds, three women’s two-man sleds and three women’s monobobs. For reference, the minimum weight of the lightest bobsled, a women’s monobob, is 357 pounds.

Van Den Berg started construction on the bobsleds two years ago and calls himself “a one-man show.”

“We didn’t want to bring them out earlier, because everybody starts copying the good stuff,” Van Den Berg said. “I don’t copy stuff. These sleds are completely different than all the other competitors.”

Van Den Berg is currently with Team USA in Italy to help set up equipment on the track at the newly constructed Cortina Sliding Centre in Cortina d’Ampezzo. If renovations to the 100-year-old sliding track at Cortina d’Ampezzo were not completed on schedule ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics, bobsled events could have been held at the Olympic Sports Complex at Mount Van Hoevenberg, which in 2024 was named the official Plan B site for the 2026 Olympic sliding events—luge, bobsled and skeleton.

Van Den Berg’s career in bobsled making started nearly two decades ago. Before 2008, he never imagined a life making bobsleds. At the time, he was in the Netherlands working for European auto racing teams when he was asked to build a bobsled for the Dutch team for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada.

“It was a surprise for me,” Van Den Berg said. “I never saw a bobsled in my life. I didn’t even know what it was, so I had to Google it.”

Years later, he was asked to work for Team Canada, which won a gold medal in the two-woman bobsled competition at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Years later, Team USA asked Van Den Berg to build bobsleds for its team, and he relocated to the Adirondacks with his wife, Sonja, and two bulldogs, Harriet and Molly—first to Wilmington in 2021, then to Elizabethtown in 2023. 

Van Den Berg said the New York State Olympic Regional Development Authority provided him space at Mount Van Hoevenberg for his workshop, with key assistance from staff members Rebecca Dalton and Ashley Walden.

“When I started for Team USA, they were not building sleds over there,” Van Den Berg said. “There was only a storage room. There was no running water, no windows, no lighting, no heating, no office, nothing. So I built my own. We came from nothing to the nation to beat at these Olympics.”

At the time, Team USA didn’t have the money to pay for new sleds, Van Den Berg said. In 2023, he founded M-USA, which stands for “Made in the United States of America,” and partnered with Massachusetts-based precision machining manufacturer Advance Mfg. Co., Inc and North Carolina-based carbon fiber manufacturer deBotech to supply materials needed to construct the bobsleds.

“The M-USA project is unique because it’s all donated. It’s not costing Team USA one penny,” Van Den Berg said. “The M-USA project is almost $4 million at this moment. If I didn’t have these great American companies behind me, behind the flag, I wouldn’t have anything, and Team USA would have no chance at a medal.”

Van Den Berg makes bobsleds from scratch himself, starting with sketches and drawings. He teams up with deBotech industrial designer Cameron Dempster to design the bobsleds, which he described as a two-month process before welding begins.

The bobsleds are made of “a mix of carbon fiber and Kevlar fiber and secret inner core,” Van Den Berg said. The carbon fiber body of each sled alone costs between $100,000 and $150,000, he said. 

Van Den Berg added that the runners — the steel blades mounted to the bottom of the bobsled — needed for the 2026 Winter Olympics were provided by Advance Mfg. Co., Inc., at a cost amounting to $1.8 million. 

“These runners make a bobsled quick, like the tires of a race car,” Van Den Berg said. “If you have bad tires on a race car, you’re never going to win. If you have good tires, you have a good chance.”

Team USA has sent 14 athletes to compete in bobsled events at the 2026 Winter Olympics. Van Den Berg is hopeful that the team, which has spent the last few days training on the track in Italy, will come home with medals, all thanks to his bobsleds. 

“We are pretty quick with our equipment and with our runners,” Van Den Berg said. “It’s going really well for Team USA.”