Letting Friendship Slide

By Robert Sullivan

With its slip-sliding Jamaicans and Monaco's Prince Albert occasionally in a can, bobsleigh, as Olympianados call it, has long seemed a silly sport. There's always some wacky thing going on, like the track melting in Calgary or summer-sports stars like hurdler Edwin Moses trying to hitch a ride to a medal. This year was going to be different. This year, since women would be competing for the first time and since some of the best women sliders were from the U.S., Americans would be engaged by a fair, clean and friendly competition. Congenial. Sweet.

Well, when you board a sled, you join the crazy club. What we've got this time is a brakeman booted from her seat by her erstwhile best friend and replaced by a woman who in 1994 had her heptathlon career interrupted by a ban for drug use by the International Amateur Athletic Federation. The men nod knowingly. "We've been going through that for a long, long time," says Todd Hays, currently the world's best driver. Staying out of the headlines has enabled him to stay on mission, he says. "The more they can take the attention away from me the better."

It's sad. Heading into this season, there were all sorts of feel-good stories on the U.S. women's team. The best duo in the world for two years running was 5-ft. 4-in. driver Jean Racine, 23, and 5-ft. 11-in. brakeman-pusher Jen Davidson, 29, a resident of Olympic-host Utah to boot. "Jean & Jen" were the first-ever golden girls of bob, "so well-rounded, articulate and charming," as their website, bobsledgirl.com put it a few short weeks ago. Not shy about trading on that charm, the pair had been photographed for cereal-box covers and had lined up other endorsements worth about half a million dollars. Other Yanks had cute angles too. Driver Jill Bakken had her best friend, Shauna Rhobock, aboard, and driver Bonny Warner was a luge veteran trying to make her fourth Olympic team with big Gea Johnson, the heptathlete in question, behind her.

But one trouble with sports is, if you're not Anna Kournikova, you've got to keep winning, and as the pre-Olympic World Cup campaign wore on, Jean & Jen didn't. Or was it just Jen who wasn't pushing her weight? The brakeman's job in a two-person sled is primarily to propel the sled at the start. Go a tenth of a second too slow in this 50-m run-up, and you're a loser. Jean & Jen finished third in one race, out of the medals in all others, as Germans swarmed the podium. Racine told Davidson not to worry. On Dec. 5, says Davidson, she got a reassuring voice mail: "You and I are going to be on the U.S. Olympic team, and whatever bulls___ we have to deal with to get us there, we're going to do it...I love you, and I believe in you...You're my girl." Yet Racine's coaches were looking for a fix. "None of the coaches was happy with the performance Jean was getting," says bobsled federation head Matt Roy. "Something had to be done."

Something was. Bakken started things by calling a "push-off" between her pal Rhobock and Vonetta Flowers. Soon Johnson was part of the contest too. It was suggested to Davidson that she toe the line as well. Davidson, asking for a chance to get back on the team in a complaint now with the American Arbitration Association, claims Racine told her there was no need to enter the push-off; her seat was safe.

Johnson won the contest, and push-off came to shove-off. Racine, as top driver, chose Johnson, the best pusher. Bakken, the No. 2 driver, took Flowers. When the music stopped, Davidson had no seat. Roy insists that his coaches didn't make the call: "Jean chose Gea." Whatever. Warner was pusherless on the eve of the trials. She scrambled but didn't qualify. "Maybe my role in all of this was to make other people's dreams come true," Warner says gamely. "It's hard to be happy with that, but I have to be."

Davidson, in no way as inured to the cruelties of big-time athletics as Warner, becomes the latest sad chapter in bobsled's legacy of oustings. In 1976 Swiss driver Erich Scharer ejected his brother three days before the Olympics; he won two medals. Just this season the woman who took Racine's mantle as top gun and gold-medal favorite, Germany's Susi-Lisa Erdmann, had four different partners.

Davidson's appeal may fail, and Racine and Johnson have a fair chance at Olympic victory. If this comes to pass, Jen's consolation will be a bitter one: what would have been one of the Games' most popular wins will be one of its most controversial.

--Reported by Amanda Bower

With reporting by Amanda Bower