Word: medal
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...with guns!), ski jumps and ski-jump hybrids. In the past, these events have given us Jamaican bobsledders, hyperdrugged European ski champs and Eddie the Eagle, Great Britain's wonderfully woebegone ski jumper who had all of Calgary ducking for cover in 1988. The U.S. has won about a medal and a half...
...DeWitt says of lugers, who travel feetfirst, "Those guys are nuts." Not at all, says Gordy Sheer, who with doubles partner Chris Thorpe won America's first-ever luge medal in Nagano. Sheer is now the team's acting marketing director: "We don't have purple hair. We're not slamming six-packs of Mountain Dew and riding our BMX bikes to practice." Perhaps not, but lugers do reach 90 m.p.h...
...finish up at the track, we visit the bobsledders. The U.S. women are famously controversial, owing to top-gun driver Jean Racine kicking her former best friend and brakeman Jen Davidson out of the sled. Racine and new brakeman Gea Johnson still have a good chance to medal. On the men's side, Texan Todd Hays, 32, is a household name from Calgary to Cortina after emerging during the current World Cup series as a daring driver with a superfast sled...
Davidson, in no way as inured to the cruelties of big-time athletics as Warner, becomes the latest sad chapter in bobsled's legacy of oustings. In 1976 Swiss driver Erich Scharer ejected his brother three days before the Olympics; he won two medals. Just this season the woman who took Racine's mantle as top gun and gold-medal favorite, Germany's Susi-Lisa Erdmann, had four different partners...
Last year the Oklahoma legislature passed a bill affirming that whites were responsible for the riot. But it did not provide reparations to a group of elderly black survivors, a redress that had set off years of controversy. (Each of them received instead a gold-plated medal with the state seal.) The archives of the Tulsa Tribune are still incomplete. But thanks to the commission--and Hirsch's book--the crimes that were covered up are now back in the collective memory...