“Team Turmoil,” perhaps the longest-running soap opera in Olympic sports, is coming to a bobsled run near you, at least if you’re at Utah Olympic Track starting Saturday.
That’s when U.S. bobsledders will take to the world’s fastest frozen water slide to try to break a 46-year drought in their sport. The last bobsled medal the U.S. won was a bronze in the 1956 four-man in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
The odds look good for an end to that futility. In the men’s two- and four-man events, driver Todd Hays established himself as a medal favorite with strong showings on this season’s World Cup circuit.
In women’s bobsledding, which is making its Olympic debut, the U.S. team of driver Jean Racine and Gea Johnson is a strong medal contender.
Don’t place any bets just yet, however, because when you mix U.S. bobsledding and the Olympics, the only thing you can count on is tumult.
No one symbolizes that better than Brian Shimer, whose sled earned the “Team Turmoil” tag in the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, for its history of controversy. That included a four-man disqualification in 1994 in Lillehammer, Norway, for overheated runners and an investigation into abnormal epitestosterone ratios in Shimer’s blood in 1998.
He survived the latter, then missed a bronze medal by just two one-hundredths of a second when his four-man sled mysteriously lost speed near the end of his final run.
Shimer, 39, is back for his fifth Olympics but isn’t considered a strong medal possibility. Hays and Racine are, so it figures turmoil would drift their way.
Hays was World Cup points leader in both two- and four-man competition before leaving the circuit with two events to go to prepare for the Olympics. On Jan. 27, however, crew member Pavle Jovanovic was disqualified from the Games for failing a drug test Dec. 29.
Hays has another strong brakeman in Chicago native Garrett Hines, so his medal chances remain strong in the two-man. Trading Jovanovic for inexperienced Bill Schuffenhauer, however, will weaken his four-man crew, which also includes Hines and Randy Jones, members of Shimer’s near-miss ’98 team.
Hays’ strongest opposition is from Germans Christoph Langen and Andre Lange. Langen, the 1998 gold medalist in four-man and bronze-medal winner in two-man, designed a four-man sled specifically for the fast Olympic Park track.
