Word: sled
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers knew they were just "the other team" in women's bobsled. How could they compete for headlines against the tawdry tales spinning around the pilot of the USA 1 sled, Jean Racine? Racine gave us betrayal, arbitration, injury, anger, death and even court dates in the family. She appeared in Olympic-themed ads for Visa and NBC. Bakken and Flowers didn't even have an agent...
Grrrrraaaack! A horrible grinding sound came from the woods. I turned and saw an asylum escapee hurtling down an icy chute, face first, on what appeared to be a cafeteria tray. He was, in fact, a member of the village "toboggan" club, out for a ride on his "skeleton" sled. Three quick thoughts emerged: it's a bit early in the day for that, he's loonier than a luger, and we'll not see skeleton in the Olympics anytime soon...
...skeletals insist, against the evidence, that they are not mad. "When all of a sudden you're on a 10-ft. wall and you've got four G-forces pushing you into the sled, that's cool," says Utahan Lincoln DeWitt, 34. He was first in the World Cup rankings last year, but has slid a bit this year. He certainly has a shot at winning, as does teammate Jim Shea Jr., 33, of Lake Placid...
...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...
...tale is a beauty. A national kickboxing champ, he won a 1994 push contest sponsored by the bobsled federation. Suddenly a guy who had barely seen a snowflake was in Lake Placid but needed a sled. To raise money to buy one, he entered the 1995 Ultimate Fighting Championship in Japan, where he faced wrestler Koichiro Kimura in the first round. "It was a hungry crowd, and the extreme-fear factor was really high," Hays recalls. Channeling the adrenaline, he beat Kimura. Hays won $10,000, bought a sled and, once on the track, discovered that "the fight had helped...