Red Stripe Beer Buys Jamaican Bobsledders Their Own Ride
Sliding into the DMs with a slippery, expensive offer.
Image: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
There’s no occasion quite like the Olympics when it comes to donning your home country’s flag and willing with all your might for your fellow compatriots to succeed. So when a moment of great need arrived for the Jamaican bobsled team, it was, naturally, a Jamaican beer brand that came to the rescue.
The Jamaican women’s bobsled team is entirely unlikely, seeing as bobsledding requires ice—something that their Caribbean island nation doesn’t have much of. Even more unlikely was that after Jamaica managed to bring its first team to the Winter Olympics, that team’s coach would quit and walk off into the Pyeongchang sunset with the team’s sled, leaving them unable to compete.
That dilemma was solved with a simple tweet.
“No bobsled, no problem. If you need a new ride @Jambobsled, put it on @RedStripe’s tab. DM us and we’ll be in touch,” the Jamaican Red Stripe Beer brand wrote from its USA Twitter account.
The bobsled team quickly responded with their phone number, which led to the ultimate purchase of a very expensive used bobsled.
When the folks at Red Stripe (which is owned by Heineken) learned of the problem, they started to put their heads together, according to the Washington Post. The team’s ex-coach had claimed that the rented bobsled was leased in her name, and that she was financially responsible for it. Unless the team wanted to buy it outright, they would not be able to use it. After Red Stripe came to terms with the cost—€40,000 (nearly $50,000) for the used sled—and confirmed that they would not be violating Olympic rules about advertising, the company made their offer.
“Some of the best ideas start out as a crazy ‘what if?’” said Red Stripe’s spokesman Bjorn Trowery to the Washington Post.
Crazy as it may have been, the team now gets to compete as planned—only now with their very own sled. As for their country’s most well-known beer company, well, its monthly expense sheet will feature one very large and very unusual line item.
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