Until a month and a half ago, Bill Schuffenhaur had never seen a bobsled. Now the Ogden resident is the brakeman on the bobsled team at the top of the America's Cup.
Decathlon fans may remember Schuffenhaur from his days competing at Roy High School, when he was ranked first in the world for the decathlon for juniors. Or they may recall his prowess in field events for the Weber State University track team.
After 1995, his last year competing at Weber State, he moved to Moscow, Idaho, to train as a hopeful for the 1996 Olympics. Unable to make the team, he returned to Utah and began training for this year's Sydney Games.
Schuffenhaur, 27, works as a personal trainer in an Ogden gym.
"Right before the Olympic trials for the 2000 games, I blew my ankle out," he said during a Deseret News interview, speaking from Lake Placid, N.Y. "Pretty much figured I was done at that point," as far as competing in the Olympics goes.
But then in one of those strange twists of fate, a friend of a friend who knew bobsled pilot Bruce Roselli told him an opening might be available on Team Roselli.
"They had four guys (a full bobsled team) when they came" to Utah for training, Schuffenhaur said. "I was going to be an alternate."
After talking to Roselli, the bobsled driver from Terre Haute, Ind., Schuffenhaur began making his way to the Utah Olympic Park at Bear Hollow, where the bobsled track winds across the snowy hills. At first earlier this fall, he merely watched what the bobsledders were doing.
"So, basically, I drove up there, if not every day, every other day — an hour up, an hour back," he said, trying at the time to at least make himself useful.
Schuffenhaur quickly learned there was more technical work to do with bobsleds than most fans of the sport realize. He joined in the bobsled maintenance and preparation, "making sure everything's aligned and sanding the runners. There's a lot of mechanical work inside the sled that has to be taken care of."
Then, about a month and a half ago, personnel changes and personality differences resulted in a vacancy in the four-man crew. "One day they asked me if I wanted to go ahead and push," he recalled. "We actually pushed better with me than one of the other guys that they had.
Thanks to his persistence and his raw skill as a first-time bobsledder, Schuffenhaur was on the team — actually on two teams. He serves as brakeman on both the two-man and four-man teams driven by Roselli, with Don McMurrian of Boise and Denton Randolph of Newton, Mass., joining the pair in the four-man sled.
Team Roselli posted the top combined time — a two-heat total of 1 minute, 35.92 seconds — for the America's Cup competition last weekend at the Utah Olympic Park. America's Cup is for World Cup wannabes, the athletes just a step below the top-flight international level.
The team is now in Lake Placid, N.Y., training for this weekend's America's Cup races at the track located at the two-time Olympic host city.
"It's real exciting, the way I got into it, with everything happening so quick," Schuffenhaur said.
He's still learning the ropes of bobsledding, admitting that he doesn't know much about what it looks like to see the track from a bobsled in motion. "Being one of the back guys," he said, "you don't get to see what's going on."
He sums up his impression of a bobsled run in just one word: "fast."
He's working with teammates on the fundamentals of bobsledding — team members push as fast as they can, get into the sled "and try to keep it a smooth ride," he said.
Schuffenhaur's inexperience even shows when he's asked about his chances of qualifying for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.
"Tell you the truth, I'm not sure," he said. "I still haven't learned exactly how they go about deciding who goes."
In a way, he said, it may have been a blessing in disguise that he missed the 2000 Summer Games. He already has a good feeling about his new winter gig.
"I feel good because I'm with a great team, a great group of guys," he said. "They're all determined and have the same drive I do."
E-MAIL: bau@desnews.com