Dawkins, who won silver in the team sprint at Rio 2016, had a decorated track career, where he was twice the Commonwealth Games champion in 2014 and 2018 in the same event, before quitting the sport in April.

This came after the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to 2021, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

His transition to his new sport consists of a lot of athletics sprint training.

"All we're doing is running zero to max speed, there's no running laps, which is great," Dawkins said.

"There's nothing over any super distance and with the timing we're testing ourselves and racing each other which is awesome as well."

He also spoke about the differences in training compared to cycling and how he is managing the switch.

"The weights are very similar, there's more of a power focus instead of a maximal strength focus," Dawkins added.

"The efforts are shorter, so the efforts running today are five seconds and shorter where as on the [cycling] track, it could be up to a minute, so it's so much nicer.

"The big thing for me has been untraining my cycling pedalling technique and turning it into some sort of running technique.

"Cycling is a very small range of motion and it's very quad dominant, whereas with the sprinting that's hamstring and glute dominant and the range is so much longer, so I spent all of lockdown doing big stretches to force my hip flexors to be longer.

"I haven't been on the ice yet, I'm not nervous about it, I'm super excited.

"My wife is nervous about it because there's so many crashes in bobsleigh and I just say there's a lot of crashes in track cycling and I've been in a few of them so it's just part of the game.

"I might be 30, but I've still got a bit of horsepower left in the legs."

New Zealand last competed in bobsleigh at the Winter Olympics at Turin 2006, where the two-man team of Matthew Dallow and Alan Henderson finished 23rd.