The first time Devon Harris competed in the Olympic bobsled competition for his native Jamaica, they turned it into a movie and called it "Cool Runnings," which is Jamaican slang for everything's A-OK.
Nearly 10 years later, Harris is living the sequel, but it's been anything but cool runnings.His bank account is nearly tapped out, he stays in a Park City hotel only because it's free and he drives around town in a borrowed car. With the Winter Olympics just two months away, he still doesn't have a sled for the Games, he has raced only three times in four years, two members of his team are off who knows where and he still doesn't know how he's going to get to Japan for the Olympics.
"We are winging it!" says Harris, hopping to his feet for emphasis after another set of bench presses at Park City High School. "Maybe I'll be kayaking to Japan. I will be there somehow."
Harris and his partners - the new ones he found last month - have been in Park City for a couple of weeks to train for the Olympics and to race in the America's Cup, which began Friday night and concludes Saturday night. They lift weights and sprint in narrow hallways at the high school, visiting with students between exercises.
Harris faces great odds just to return to the Olympics, but what else is new? Isn't that the story of his career? Wasn't that the appeal of the movie?
Harris is one of the four Jamaican bobsledders whose underdog story in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary was told in "Cool Runnings" - or at least it was told as closely as Hollywood ever comes to telling a real-life story.
Since then, the foursome has broken up. Harris struck out on his own to become a driver. Of the other three members of the original Jamaican team, Chris and Dudley Stokes have formed their own four-man team, and Michael White is retired from the sport. After placing 35th in the 1992 Olympic two-man race, Harris retired for three years and took a job managing a department store in New York. He quit his job a year ago and launched a comeback for the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games.
"Unfinished business," he explains. "The rest of the world thought that '88 team was a bunch of jokers. We can be medal contenders. I'm back because of the oxymoron called Jamaican bobsled. When people think of Jamaica, they think of sun, sea and surf."
Harris' unfinished business has brought him west. With limited resources, the Jamaican government awarded its funding to Dudley's four-man team, leaving Harris to scrounge for survival in the two-man competition. The sport requires serious scrounging, costing up to $150,000 per season for a two-man bobsled team to cover travel, equipment, room and board.
Last summer, Paul Skog, an Evanston, Wyo., attorney and a big "Cool Runnings" fan, hatched a plan for Evanston to share in some of Utah's Olympic glory. He wanted to invite the Jamaican bobsledders to live and train in the town, which is just 55 minutes from Utah's Winter Sports Park. He pitched the idea to local businessmen, and they endorsed it. They gave Harris and his team free airfare, free lodging and jobs making and selling pizzas. The town held a bake sale to raise funds for them and even built a practice sled for them.
"I got this far because of the kindness of Evanston," says Harris. "They adopted us."
Harris, along with then-partners Patrick Robinson and Jason Morris, were regular sights around Evanston, sprinting on the high school track, lifting weights at the gym and running long distances on the road.
"The best part of their story is the sequel in which they come to Evanston and train for the Olympics," says Skog with a laugh. "We hope they come back to train for 2002."
The sequel would certainly not be lacking for another underdog theme. Since breaking training camp at the end of September, the team has encountered numerous difficulties. Morris returned to Jamaica to take a job as an airline pilot, although Harris thinks he will rejoin him for the Olympics. Harris doesn't know where Robinson wound up - "in school some-where."
He recruited replacements last month: Michael Morgan, a tall, muscular, 36-year-old sprinter, and alternate Scott Swaby, Jamaican-born, Utah-raised. But not even Harris knows who will actually ride with him in the Olympics.
Harris is a long shot, at best, to challenge for a medal. So far, his comeback has consisted of one race last season (it was all he could afford) and one race last month in Calgary, where he finished 14th the first night and crashed on the second night.
To complicate matters, Harris doesn't even have a sled. A new one, which can go for $25,000, is out of the question. He has been training and racing recently in a 7-year-old sled that supposedly was going to be paid for by a sponsor, but the sponsorship fell through and he says he must return the sled after Saturday's race. Not that he wants it, anyway.
"We're getting beaten by equipment right now," he says.
He's shopping for a new sled, or rather a new used one that he can afford. About now, Harris's visitor wants to know why he's so short of funds. After all, there was the movie. Who didn't see it? It had to be successful, right?
"They ripped us off," Harris says. "We got some money up front. They promised us 2 percent of the profit, but they say there is no profit. The whole world knows that's not true."
For that matter, not much of the movie is true, either. It's true that Harris and his friends were in the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, but Hollywood took over from there, fiction apparently being better than life.
That "cool runnings" theme the team supposedly adopted? Wrong. They nicknamed themselves the Rag-A-Muffins, which Harris says represented "a can-do attitude."
The discovery of a bobsled racer in push cart races? Never hap-pen-ed.
The coach with the dark past? No.
Carrying the sled down the track after crashing? No.
The awe for the Swiss team? No way.
The ice-cream truck scene? Cute, but no.
Selling kisses to raise money? Well, yes, Harris did do that.
The team being conceived by a sprinter looking for another Olympic venue after he fell during a race in the summer Olympic trials? Pure fiction.
Actually, the team was conceived on a bet. Two American businessmen, after arguing that Jamaicans are the best natural athletes in the world and could compete in any contest, made a bet and funded the team in 1988 to prove it. They asked the army for volunteers. Harris, an army captain, was "volunteered" by his commander. Three months later he was in the Olympics.
The crash? That part was true. After posting the seventh-fastest starting time, the Jamaicans crashed, ending their scant hopes for a medal. It was also true that they used a sled that they had had only a matter of weeks.
"The one main thing that was true about that movie is that it captured the spirit of the team," says Harris.
This Rag-A-Muffin will need all of that again in Nagano.