You could see the signs, building in the subtle but unmistakable way that a low-pressure system gathers and roils before bringing the end of a drought -- in this case, 62 years without Olympic gold in the four-man bobsled. It ended Saturday, in spectacular fashion, to the clanging of cowbells omnipresent at such races, as Steven Holcomb drove team Night Train -- as USA 1 is known -- to the gold medal.
Some of the signs came long ago, those first winds foreshadowing the storm. Like the start of the Bo-Dyn Bobsled Project in 1992, when NASCAR legend Geoff Bodine watched the U.S. flailing at the Albertville Games and decided he no longer wanted American athletes to have to raise their own money just to buy the sleds that Germans used and discarded.
Bodine's friend and chassis builder Bob Cuneo was head engineer back then and now, eighteen years later, the U.S. team has a sled garage in Lake Placid, N.Y., that houses 17 American-made sleds with proprietary American technology. The most obvious sign of the drought's impending terminus came adjacent to that garage, on the Lake Placid sliding course last year when the Night Train won the first world championship title for the U.S. in 50 years.
Even the ominous thunderheads that rolled in were ultimately pierced by sunlight. In 2001, Holcomb was diagnosed with keratoconus, a degenerative eye condition that causes the corneas to bulge outward. By '07, and at first unbeknownst to his teammates, he was essentially driving blind, with vision that had deteriorated to 20/500. Holcomb's four-man team had finished second in the World Cup that year, which earned them a funding infusion that paid for training time at the track in Calgary in late summer. But, one day, Holcomb didn't show for practice. When Brian Shimer, the head U.S. bobsled coach sought him out and asked why, "He said, 'Well, I've got bigger fish to fry'," Shimer recalls. "I thought, it took me five Olympic Games to reach that level when I could win a [bronze] medal [in '02], so when he said that, I'm thinking, what could possibly be more important than prepping for a great season when you just came off a great season?" The fish was Holcomb's impending blindness.
Contact lenses didn't come that strong, so Holcomb was, surely and not so slowly, watching the world fade away. "If I looked at trees," he said, "I would just see a bunch of green. I couldn't see leaves." But Shimer would not let his blue-chip talent walk away, so he consulted with a former bobsledder turned doctor who mentioned a progressive surgery. The next year, Holcomb had an operation to fix his vision in which lenses made of a special polymer were implanted behind his irises. By that time, though, necessity had taught him to consider the sled an extension of his body, and to drive by feeling the pressure exerted by the course in his arms, legs, and back, as opposed to waiting to process visual cues, which slows down a driver's reaction time. "Other drivers ask me how to steer a certain curve," Holcomb says, "and I can't really tell them. You have to feel it." On Whistler's tricky curve 11-12-13 sequence that bedeviled the world's top drivers at this Olympics, Holcomb felt his way through.
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