WHILE many of the world's top athletes are vying for Olympic medals in Rio, elite athletes from Brazil are training for the Olympics on an isolated country estate in North Yorkshire.

If that wasn't sufficiently mind-boggling, the revelation that the six-man squad – from Rio and Sao Paulo where it hasn't snowed for 31 years – are determined to seriously challenge in the next Winter Olympics four-man bobsleigh competition must be.

The team of former sprinters and decathletes, who are from underprivileged backgrounds, are in the middle of a two-month stint training in Yorkshire for Pyeongchang 2018, with regular sessions at Camp Hill, near Bedale.

They have been brought to a summer training track, described as the country's best, by Jo Manning, a former Great Britain Bobsleigh Association boss, who is coaching the team until the Olympics, with help from Nicola Minichiello, who became the first British woman to win the World Bobsleigh championships in 2009.

Middlesbrough-born Ms Manning said the Brazilians had made huge progress pushing a 250kg sled on rails at the gently sloping track, built in 1998 by bobsleigh veteran Sir Bruce Ropner, and were aiming for a top ten place at the games.

She said the training experience had had a dramatic effect on the Brazilians, leading several members of the team, including one who left school aged 11, to decide to return to education, as well as boosting their strength and discipline.

Ms Manning, who last night took the team to the Apple Tree pub in Marton, near her mother's home to introduce them to British culture, added: "It is a whole education for them, teaching them to eat and hydrate properly, that British athletes would grow up knowing. I love working with them because it is an opportunity to help improve their lives."

Bobsleigh pilot Edson Bindilatti, who took up the sport after watching Cool Runnings, a movie about the Jamaican 1988 bobsleigh team, said the experience at Camp Hill and living in Yorkshire had been a complete contrast to the team's life in Brazil, where home life could be difficult and the facilities and coaching are not as good.

He said: "My friends and family thought it was so funny that we were coming here when the world's athletes were going to Brazil.

"As well as training, this is helping us with our lives, we are all learning English and about different culture.

"It's all very different for us. We went to Whitby and had fish and chips, which we loved."

Brakeman, Rafael Souza, who is from a favela in Rio known for its drugs and gun crime, has worn a woolly hat throughout the British summer as the temperatures are much colder than he is used to.

He said since joining the team he had "enjoyed waking every morning to the sound of silence, rather than gunfire".