GREAT Britain bobsleigh star John Jackson will play the waiting game after suffering a further setback to his infamous Achilles’ injury.

The 37-year-old GB1 pilot, who was based in Trowbridge in the lead-up to February’s Winter Olympics, astounded medical professionals by leading the country’s top four-man sled at Sochi 2014, less than eight months after going under the knife to repair a ruptured Achilles’ tendon.

But Jackson says that he has yet to fully recover from his injury after undergoing a pioneering procedure last year and is certain to miss the start of the bobsleigh World Cup season later this year.

“The pain has never really gone away and it’s only when I’ve been getting up in the mornings in the last month or so that it’s died down,” said the Great Britain ace.

“I had pins, cables and wires drilled in and it’s not necessarily the soft tissue that’s been causing the problem but more the area around the heel bone.

“The problem is that I’m a bit of a guinea pig.

“It’s not like an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injury where they can look back at other cases and say ‘this is what it should be like at this stage’.

“I’ve been on crutches for the last week-and-a-half and one thing I’m not going to do is rush things – we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.”

Jackson, who is expecting his first child with women’s GB1 pilot Paula Walker in Novmber, also revealed that he has made no concrete decisions on whether to hang up his race suit before the 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

“I had two years in my head and it’s too early to look at 2018 as a target yet.

“I’ve family and things like that to think about, so we’ll just have to see how things progress,” said the bobsleigh star.

Jackson has relocated from his Paxcroft Mead home to Exmouth, but continues to use the University of Bath as his training base.