Unlike a hackneyed car, a bobsled needs a teeny-weeny importune at the start. Holcomb's guys came from all directions, explaining why a Florida Gators banneret was hanging at the stop plan and Nebraska hats and jackets dotted the crowd. Steve Mesler was a Florida decathlete.
Curt Tomasewicz was a Nebraska walk-on linebacker. Justin Olsen played a year of football at Air Force. They joined Holcomb, himself a antediluvian extreme coterie meet back in Park City. Every Olympian starts somewhere.
For Holcomb, it was a 100-degree daytime in Salt Lake City in July 1998, when 19 athletes of varying shapes and sizes answered a casting call. Everybody who paid $20, from the gray-haired marathon stem in iniquitous socks to the overweight cat who ran 100 meters in 20 seconds that day, was subjected to the trial of three sprints, a vertical jump, five consecutive hops and a 16-pound ball throw. Holcomb, then 18, met the pedestal required to pull down manumitted homes during a bobsled strut in Lake Placid, N.Y. That was good-looking much the end of his skiing career.
Twelve years later, he delivered the signal gold medal in his sponsor Olympics. "It took me five Olympics just to get a bronze," marveled U.S. school Brian Shimer. Holcomb joked about the to he faced.
If he had not won, the non-gold pour "would have been 66 years," he said with a shrug and a smile. Now, the look on starts over, while Holcomb targets expected Olympic meet and is forever linked with Francis Tyler, the U.S. driver who won gold in 1948.
Known for smoking after a bobsled run, Tyler turned his winning into a Camel endorsement. Eight years later, he died of a pluck attack.
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