TORINO — About as far from their original Olympic ambitions as the Alps are from Utah, Steve Holcomb and Bill Schuffenhauer are an unlikely pair in an unlikely place.
Since both are from Utah it would only be natural to assume the two men — teamed together in the USA-2 sled in today's finals of the two-man Olympic bobsled race — were very early on joined at the hip. Boyhood pals, maybe; bobsledders from birth.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Holcomb, 25, grew up in Park City and started out his sporting life as a ski racer. Schuffenhauer, 32, grew up in Salt Lake City and the Ogden area, and started out as a decathlete in track and field.
If life and athletics had gone as planned, neither one would even be here, hunched together, chasing Olympic glory in a $50,000 sled. They probably would not know each other.
But life and athletics didn't go as planned — what does? —and it wasn't until each turned to plan B that they became Olympic teammates.
"B" as in bobsled.
Holcomb started skiing at age 2 and was on the Park City Ski Team by age 9. Although he did play soccer and football and was on the track team at Park City High School, ski racing was his game. And he was serious enough that as a teenager he switched from Park City High to the Park City Winter School so he could go to classes in the summer and race full time in the winter.
He had full support at home. His parents, dad Steve, a former college football player in Colorado, and mom Jean Anne, gave him plenty of encouragement and willingly paid his private-school tuition and traveling expenses, while his older sisters, Stephanie and Megan, cheered him on.
And he was not bad. At one point he was an age-group points leader in Super G, and he won his share of races.
But he could never quite break into the upper tier of racers that would get him onto the U.S. Ski Team and bring him closer to his dream of ski racing in the Olympics.
It was in the summer of 1998, after he graduated from high school, that he switched to bobsled. Alerted to a tryout camp at Skyline High School in Salt Lake City, he sailed through the bobsled federation's seven-item jumping and sprinting test with the highest score in the camp. At a second camp, he had the highest score again. That secured an invitation to Lake Placid, N.Y., to try out for the national team. After a week of testing, among 100 invitees, Holcomb ranked No. 7.
Barely months into his new sport, he was already an alternate on U.S. Bobsled's national development team.
Bill Schuffenhauer's route to bobsled, while equally convoluted, could hardly be more dissimilar.
When he was born in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1973, Schuffenhauer's biological father was already long gone. And while his mother was there, that's using the term loosely.
The top priority for Lillian Archuletta, who had five children by five fathers, was feeding a drug habit that kept her perennially unemployed and in and out of jail. The kids lived on and off the streets, sometimes dumpster-diving for dinner because the food stamps the family had received had been traded for drugs.
Schuffenhauer wasn't skiing by age 3, he was smoking pot.
"That's how my mom lived," he told Deseret Morning News columnist Doug Robinson. "I drank and smoked marijuana all through grade school. Even as pre-schoolers, we'd get my little brother high, and he was 2 years old."
Foster care inevitably came, followed by the just-as-inevitable rebellion. Once, Bill ran away from his foster home and tried to carry his little brother Rob in a pillow case to his grandmother's house until social services authorities caught up with him.
Eventually, though, he did get to Grandma's house. When he was 12 he was placed in his grandmother's care in Roy, where an unexpected influence was waiting that would steer him away from the old bad influences: sports.
Starting in ninth grade, the track coach at Roy High School, Neville Peterman, took the troubled kid under his wing and put him on a new path. An early bloomer, Schuffenhauer was naturally good at virtually everything in both track and field. By his senior year in 1991, he was state champion in the javelin and long jump and second in both hurdles races as he carried Roy High to its first-ever state track championship.
A scholarship to nearby Weber State followed, where the track coaches, Chick Hislop and Dan Walker, took the baton from Peterman. Schuffenhauer would live for a time in the home of each of his coaches and each would become the father figure he never had, while their wives became surrogate mothers.
"We were his family," says Hislop. "He's a very likable person, very easy to be around. It was never easy for him — he had his challenges — but he stuck with it and he made it."
At Weber State, Schuffenhauer rounded into one of the country's top decathletes. He won three consecutive Big Sky championships and, just as he had at Roy High School, carried Weber State to the school's first-ever conference championship.
Talk of Olympic grandeur naturally followed. Schuffenhauer was seen as the next Dan O'Brien — another decathlete who survived a troubled past. But injuries prior to the U.S. track and field trials for both the 1996 and 2000 Summer Olympics got in the way.
It was as he was recovering from a severe ankle sprain in the summer of 2000 that someone brought up the idea of Schuffenhauer taking his jumping and sprinting skills to bobsled.
"It was by chance, really," he says. "I had planned on retiring from sports when a friend said I should go for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake. I thought that was crazy since I figured I had nothing in common with any winter sport, until they introduced bobsled to me. Then it all just clicked. In short, I happened to know the right person who knew the other right person who put me in the right place at the right time."
Eighteen months later, Schuffenhauer found himself brakeman in the four-man bobsled driven by Todd Hays that ended a 46-year medal drought and won a silver medal for America at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games.
His ascension was so meteoric and unexpected — he only got on Hays' team at the last minute when regular brakeman Pavle Jovanovic was suspended for a positive drug test — that few were prepared for it.
Schuffenhauer's mother, for one. At the time of the Salt Lake Games, she was in the Salt Lake County Jail on a drug-related offense. She watched her son win his medal on the jailhouse television.
Four years later and it's Schuffenhauer and Holcomb together in Torino.
Holcomb, who barely missed making the U.S. squad for the Salt Lake Games when he was 21, has steadily climbed up the bobsled ladder ever since. Three years ago he made the successful transition from pusher to driver and became a rival to Hays and Mike Kohn, the veteran he beat out to qualify for Torino as the pilot of USA-2 in both two-man and four-man.
As a driver, Holcomb is currently ranked seventh in the world in two-man and ninth in four-man. His best finish in the 2005-6 World Cup season was a fifth at Cortina, Italy, two months ago, with Bill Schuffenhauer riding right behind.
Schuffenhauer's post-Salt Lake history has been filled with more triumphs. He was on Hays-driven teams that placed second and third in the world championships in 2003 and 2004 and won three gold medals at periodic stops along the World Cup circuit. He also partnered occasionally with Hays in the two-man event.
But he was eventually bumped off Team Hays primarily because of the return of Jovanovic, the man whose place he took in Salt Lake. (Jovanovic, whose two-year suspension ended in 2004, has maintained that it was a nutritional supplement that unknowingly caused his positive drug test, and both Hays and the U.S. Bobsled Federation have stood behind him.)
Not riding with Hays, who is ranked third in the world in both two- and four-man, makes winning another Olympic medal a much longer shot. But, considering all the twists and turns in his life, Schuffenhauer has taken it in stride.
"Steve and I will be part of history together and doing so as an all-Utah team," he says. "I find it very interesting that Steve and I trained for two completely different sports towards the Olympic dream and now we find ourselves together going for the same goal in the same sport. It is definitely something to write home about. Even if we don't make the podium we have accomplished something very few accomplish and even more so in the state of Utah."
Wherever Schuffenhauer finishes, he will have the peace of mind this go-around that his 55-year-old mother won't be watching him from a jail cell. According to Bill, Lillian Archuletta is now living in Arizona, close to her own mother, where "she is now doing well as far as keeping off the drugs goes."
He didn't elaborate about what prompted her to go straight after all these years. Maybe the example of her Olympian son had something to do with it.
Lee Benson's column will run daily throughout the Torino Olympics.
E-mail: lbenson@desnews.com