UTAH OLYMPIC PARK ? Women, black athletes, an aging prince, competitors from tropical countries ? all made their marks on the bobsled track during the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Olympics.
For the first time, the sport of bobsled racing is truly gender-blind, with women from around the world dazzling spectators with their swift runs and sharp-edged driving. The International Olympic Committee wisely opened the event to women, and they proved how thrilling competition can be.
With the gold medal going to Jill Bakken, Park City, and her driver Vonetta Flowers, Helena, Ala., (first black athlete to medal in the Winter Games), women's bobsled made a great advance. The sport seems likely to start winning the kind of support that women's ice hockey earned in 1998, when Team USA beat Canada.
The silver and bronze medals the American men bobsledders won Saturday erased the pain of a 46-year "medal drought" and vastly boosted interest in the sport.
Bonny Warner of Discovery Bay, Calif. ? an airline captain and bobsled pilot ? worked tirelessly to make women's bobsledding an Olympic sport. During an interview Saturday beside the Utah Olympic Park track, she said people now see all sides of bobsled.
"In the end, bobsled is a real, true sport. And I think more people will come into it. That'll be good," Warner said.
The Salt Lake Winter Games made a lot of people believers in women's bobsledding, according to Warner. "We held a beautiful race. I mean, nobody crashed. It was a very tight and very exciting race."
She ran into a woman member of the International Olympics Committee Saturday morning and commented that this showed that women's bobsled and skeleton really belong in the Games. "She said, 'Yep, they did.'"
The Utah track will help bring about that recognition, Warner said.
"We have a beautiful track here ? such a great facility."
The $20 million bobsled/luge/skeleton track at Utah Olympic Park has been the site of World Cup international bobsled competition since November 1998. It is part of the regular World Cup tour and should remain an important venue, as one of only three tracks in North America. The others are in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Calgary, Canada.
Not only is the track convenient for Western Hemisphere teams, in terms of training and competition, it's also a thrilling venue. At just over 0.8 of a mile long, it is arguably the fastest among the planet's 11 tracks.
When officials broke ground here in 1995, they predicted bobsleds would reach a maximum speed of 83 miles per hour. During the four-man Olympics race, bobsleds flashed down the track faster than 86 mph.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com