This is part of Slate’s 2026 Olympics coverage. Read more here.
As a Jamerican ’90s kid raised in the States, there wasn’t a lot of popular culture that spoke to my specific hereditary blend. I remember watching a VHS tape of Anansi, an animated telling of folktales narrated by Denzel Washington attempting his best Jamaican accent. And then there was Cool Runnings, which I saw for the first time when I was 5 years old.
To my kid brain, the 1993 Disney biopic about the debut of the Jamaican four-man bobsled team at the 1988 Winter Olympics wasn’t just funny. It was also intensely quotable, and even informative—I had no idea that Jamaica competed in the Winter Olympics until I saw the movie. And this feel-good, slapstick, family comedy wasn’t just a touchstone for me. When I was growing up in Philadelphia, it was up there with Bob Marley as a cultural marker of Jamaica for American kids.
Three-plus decades after its release, Cool Runnings’ cultural importance hasn’t waned. This year, with the island back in the four-man bobsled race (and determined to top the 1994 team, which placed 14th), there are dozens of TikToks showing non-Jamaicans pledging fealty to their own countries’ Olympic teams except where bobsledding is concerned. The current Jamaican team itself has gotten in on the action with an ad for Airbnb that is chock full of Cool Runnings references.
Whenever I come across this stuff on social media, I activate like a sleeper agent—my brain can’t stop itself from thinking “feel di riddim, feel di rhyme.” But despite that automated response, and the warm nostalgia I still have for this relic from my childhood, I’ve come to see Cool Runnings differently. It’s a wholesome movie, sure, and the bobsledders and their coach, played by John Candy in one of his final film roles, have their charm. But the accents are horrible, the story is pretty far from the truth, and the depiction of Jamaicans as a people is a little too hunky-dory. (I’ll admit, though, it is still funny and very relatable, personally, when it comes to the harsh reality of facing cold temperatures.)
That’s my Jamerican perspective, though. I was curious what people who grew up on the island thought of the movie then and how they feel about it today.
My cousin Alexis Goffe remembered seeing Cool Runnings in a cineplex in Kingston, Jamaica, when it first came out. He was 8 or 9 years old, and it was the first “Jamaican-esque” movie he’d ever seen. Alexis thought it was funny, and he told me that seeing local big names like Jamaican actor Charles Hyatt on-screen felt important. “At the end, and I’d never seen or heard this before, a round of applause broke out in the movie theater,” he said.
For years after, Alexis’ classmates in Jamaica quoted it—“ ‘Sanka, ya dead?’ was just consistently in our vernacular in prep school,” he told me. But his perception of the movie shifted when he moved to the States. It actually started on his first trip to the U.S., when a Transportation Security Administration agent told his colleague, “This kid from Jamaica is going to Minnesota,” and that second agent referenced Cool Runnings in response.
“It was literally my first day heading to college that it came up, and it was just a persistent thing,” Alexis said. This Cool Runnings fixation steadily grated on him, revealing that many white Americans saw Jamaica in a reductionist way, as a faraway place to be mined for entertainment. “It changed my perspective because then I just felt like, Ugh, gross. I don’t want to hear any more Cool Runnings fucking references.”
Alexis’ younger sister, my cousin Kimberley Goffe, isn’t old enough to remember seeing Cool Runnings in a theater, and she didn’t grow up quoting it. But she had a similar experience to her brother’s when she left Jamaica in 2006 and went to a predominantly white New England boarding school. Her classmates rotated between three or four reference points: Cool Runnings, Bob Marley, smoking weed, and maybe jerk chicken. (When Usain Bolt became the fastest man in the world in 2008, he got added to that rotation.) “It’s a very narrow perception of what Jamaica is, how we are, who we are. These are their cultural touchstones, which obviously were not my cultural touchstones,” she said.
Kimberley’s main takeaway from the movie was shared by nearly everyone I talked to about the movie (and by me): The Jamaican characters had “abominable” accents. My cousin Robert Lumsden told me he found those sham Caribbean voices disrespectful. “It’s a difficult accent to reproduce, apparently,” he said, “but there is enough of a diaspora that you would think that there could be a talent pool to draw from to reproduce it accurately.”
None of the actors who played the four Jamaican bobsledders were born and raised in Jamaica, and as far as I can tell only two of them (Doug E. Doug, who has a Jamaican father, and Rawle D. Lewis, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago) are of Caribbean descent. In an oral history of Cool Runnings done by the Independent, the white American director, Jon Turteltaub, revealed the instruction he’d been given by Walt Disney Studios chair Jeffrey Katzenberg: Get the actors to sound like Sebastian, the crab from The Little Mermaid.
Cool Runnings’ vocal travesty was in some ways worth tolerating, as the movie provided relatively benign quotes for American kids to parrot. Lumsden, my cousin, preferred “Sanka, ya dead?” to getting asked, “Do you have roads?” and “Do you live in tree houses?” Vivian Barclay, who grew up in Jamaica and is now a music publishing executive in Canada, pointed out that the film is like “two sides of a coin. On one side, you felt really excited that this feel-good story was coming out of Jamaica, which at that time got negative stories about drugs and crime. But on the other side, the movie was also a caricature of the characters and a caricature of what life would be like.” That caricature, Barclay pointed out, has had a lasting effect on the people of the island, who have “lived the legacy of that now for many, many years.”
Cool Runnings was based on a true story and a group of real people. One of them was Devon Harris, a founding member of the original Jamaican bobsled team. “I remember when we watched it for the first time, we were relieved because there was no scene in there with us smoking weed,” he told me. While Cool Runnings is “a really good human-interest story,” he said, it does “play a little bit into the stereotypical view of Jamaicans as fun—as too much of an easygoing thing. We are easygoing, but I think our easygoing nature as Jamaicans generally clouds the seriousness with which we approach things when it’s time to work.” Though the rest of the world saw the Jamaican bobsled team as a straight-up comedy, what gets lost in perpetuating that joke, as Harris put it, “is the grit and determination and the tenacity that it took to learn a sport that was completely alien to you in a few months to get to the Olympic Games. There’s no balance there in how that is portrayed in the movie, to be honest.”
That grit and tenacity are the foundation of the real story of how Harris got on the bobsled team. He told me the whole endeavor started when a couple of Americans—part of the inspiration for John Candy’s character, Irv Blitzer—saw two Jamaicans racing pushcarts “on the side of a mountain without the snow.” It looked like bobsledding, and “a big part of the race is the start. You need sprinters, and of course we have lots of sprinters.” (Indeed, one of the members of this year’s bobsled team, Tyquendo Tracey, is the first athlete ever to run under 10 seconds in the 100 meters and compete in the Winter Games.) At the time, Harris was a young lieutenant in the Jamaica Defence Force. When his colonel urged him to go to team trials, he realized, “I have to make this team. I’ve always wanted to represent Jamaica in sports, and this was my shot.”
Kerry-Ann Reid-Brown, founder of the Caribbean-American Carry On Friends podcast, told me that this type of story is a common one in Jamaica. As she noted about the island, “the container is small by nature, the geography is small,” so expertise sometimes has to come from elsewhere. “Someone outside has to see it because a fish in water don’t know it’s in water.” Once introduced to a new venture, Jamaicans won’t lack for confidence. “One thing about Jamaica, we’re a boasty set of people,” Reid-Brown told me.
“As Jamaicans, we love when we make a splash in an area that people didn’t think of us in,” Barclay said. “I don’t know what that is about the Jamaican psyche that says, Let’s go show up in places that just don’t seem to be logical. Jamaicans are just like that. We’re going to excel at whatever you put us out to do.”
Cool Runnings’ framing of the whole bobsled endeavor as a joke is, perhaps, partially responsible for the way the island’s tourism industry feeds into stereotypes. “Walking down the street in Jamaica and seeing all the stupid Rasta hats with the fake dreads on it,” Barclay said, “I think a lot of that can be attributed to things like Cool Runnings … and that kind of fetishization of Rasta and Jamaican culture.”
Still, some of Jamaica’s cultural experts believe there’s something about Cool Runnings that’s worth preserving. Reid-Brown, who also co-hosts the podcast Reels & Riddims, which dissects Caribbean representation on-screen, told me it’s commendable that the movie actually filmed in Jamaica. She also sees Cool Runnings as a great source of nostalgia, particularly for how it documents Jamaican ballahoo culture, the tradition of racing with homemade pushcarts. “Maybe it’s [still] in more rural parts of Jamaica, but I don’t see that ballahoo culture, that cart culture anymore,” she said.
For many of the people I spoke to, Cool Runnings was also a source of knowledge. Even as native Jamaicans, they didn’t know before seeing the movie that there’d ever been a Jamaican bobsled team. The 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary came in an era when foreign media broadcasts weren’t available for most people on the island, Reid-Brown said, because “only people of a certain class had a satellite dish.” Harris, who was on the Jamaican bobsled team, told me that someone he coached later on had found out about bobsledding from Cool Runnings.
When people ask Harris about the movie, he runs through the handful of plot points that are legitimately true: “There was a bobsled team from Jamaica, we had a problem finding funding, we went to the Olympics, and we crashed.” But the reality of the Jamaican bobsled team was at times even harder to believe than the Hollywood version. “According to the movie,” he told me, “we were training as a four-man team from the very beginning. The truth is that the first time we ever raced a four-man sled was at the Olympics.”
I gasped, and he continued. “It gets worse: Our brakeman, Chris Stokes, was not even on the team at the start of the Olympics. Chris was on a track scholarship in Moscow, Idaho, and he came to the Olympics to watch his brother, Dudley Stokes, race. We recruited him that week and took three days to teach him how to push a sled.”
However you feel about Cool Runnings, it’s undeniable that it made the Jamaican bobsled team an international sensation. Harris told me that when he first went to Europe, people would see “four black guys walking on the street dressed in similar jackets” and assume they were American basketball players. “But then Cool Runnings brought this to stratospheric levels. I would say it definitely immortalized us.”
The way I see it, Cool Runnings may fail in a number of important ways, but it’s a gateway to a number of incredibly vital conversations: about the Jamaican government’s lackluster support of non–track and field sports; about what happens when a nation subsists on the tourism industry but the tourism industry subsists, in part, on stereotypes; and about the veracity of mainstream Caribbean stories and who gets to tell them.
For me, the Olympics have always been one of the only events that makes me feel, strongly, like a person that is of two places, as opposed to more Jamaican one day and American the next. I owe a part of that to Cool Runnings. I also hope that when the real-life Jamaican bobsled team competes this weekend, they’ll create a record-breaking moment for the island that will surpass and outlive the movie I first saw when I was 5 years old.