Panama bid for a role in Winter Olympics awakens memories
By David Young
Panama, which won it first gold medal at the last Summer Olympics, could be heading for participation in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia.
Christoph Zollinger and Jonathan Romero are planning to follow in the footsteps of Jamaica and create a bobsled team. They are launching a “Spirit Of Panama," campaign in April and have already posted a video on YouTube,
The video lasts one minute and 37 seconds with images recorded in Switzerland and Panama. Vice President Juan Carlos Varela is shown giving a message of support and expressing the wish that Panama's flag flies at the Russian venue.
The couple are training in Panama, and in climates and locations more attuned to the event, overseas, including St Moritz in Switzerland. {jathumbnail off}
And if you think they have joined the loco club, think again. I watched the newly born Jamaican bobsled team in action when covering the 1988 Olympics. In Calgary, Canada. It was a year when, to the discomfort of the organizers Calagary's famed chinook descended on the city, and on the middle Sunday of the two week event, temperatures rose to 17 degrees, people roamed the city in shorts and talk was abroad of moving the ski jumping to Thunder Bay in Ontario something that would not have sat well with the proud Westerners.
And it was a ski jumper who shared the headlines with the Jamaican bobsled team. “Freddie the Eagle,” (Michael Edwards) was Britain’s first, and so far, last, entry in Olympic ski jumping and his jumping performance led to a tightening of the rules to make future entries more difficult.
Edwards came last in all of his jumps, but still created a record for the longest by a British competitor. At the Olympics he was self funded, but his lack of success and the world wide attention he received turned out to be a commercial bonanza,
He already held the world record for a stunt jump over 10 cars and 6 buses and people in Canada including me, lined up to buy Freddie the Eagle and Jamaican Bobsled Team T-shirts.
At the closing ceremony, the president of the Organizing Committee, Frank King, said: "At this Games, some competitors have won gold, some have broken records, and some of you have even soared like an eagle." Over, 100,000 people in the stadium roared "Eddie! Eddie!". It was the first time in the history of the games that an individual athlete had been mentioned in the closing speech.
After the Olympics, his world wide fame ensured his commercial success and a charter airline gave him a five year contract to help fund his bid for a place in the 1998 Olympics in Japan.
In 2008 he was invited back to Calgary to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Games . and led a procession of skiers down the slopes of the Canada Olympic Park, carrying an Olympic Torch
Edwards was also a torchbearer in the relay for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. A film, based on his life, is currently in the works.
The story of the Jamaican Bobsled team, has a longer term sporting record, with a constant repeat of Olympic participation since 1988, a smack in the eye for those who laughed at the original team.
Like Edwards, who had failed to qualify for the Olympics as a downhill skier Devon Harris who had missed qualifying as a middle distance runner for the LA Summer Olympics Devon found another way to participate beneath the five Olympic rings.
While serving in the Jamaican army in 1987, he saw an advert for "dangerous and rigorous" trials to choose the nation's first Olympic bobsledders. “The idea seemed ridiculous, but I tried my darndest and made the team.
He also discovered a new passion and went on to alternate between bobsledding and army life for the next decade. One week before the Olympics, Chris Stokes, who had traveled with the team as a cheer leader for his brother Dudley hadnever seen a bobsled before. When a team member injured an ankle while trainng on unfamiliar ice. Chris was pulled. "We taught him everything we knew " said Harris. The event started three days later and Stokes went on to compete in four Winter Olympics and to lead the Jamaican Bobsleigh Federation.
The team had a terrible Olympic debut when a push bar collapse collapsed while driver Dudley Stokes was hopping in but on the second day of competition the Team recorded its best ever start, the seventh fastest in Calgary. But while traveling at 85 mph stoke a Sandhurst-trained army officer, still involved with Jamaican bobsledding today – lost control. The sled crashed with the team underneath but they climbed out and pushed the sled to the end of the run, the dream ended, for that year. A feature film built on the team's endeavors shows them carrying the sled on their shoulders, another silver screen myth. But the reality was for Jamaica it was the start of a new sporting endeavor.
Radio operator and army reservist brakeman Michael White also competed in the two-man bobsled with Dudley in 1988. Like his three team-mates, White went on to compete at the Winter Olympics in Albertville, France in 1992. Jamaica, , has sustained its bobsled program to this day, with the team overseen by the Stokes brothers.
So for Panama the Olympic ambitions of two men, could be the beginning of a new sporting challenge. Stand by to purchase your Panama Bobsled T Shirt, and to sit alongside expats from the frozen north when the hot belt challengers hit the ice in Russia.
