LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - On one of the coldest days of winter, things definitely are uncool for the Jamaican bobsled team.
With little time left before competition, team driver Winston Watts dashes from the Olympic Training Center to Zig Zags, a Main Street bar, hoping to find a little something to give him an edge.
Like, say, a bobsled.
Zig Zags keeps a battered, old sled on the sidewalk as a landmark, which puts the saloon one up on the Jamaicans, who showed up for the America's Cup race without their mode of transportation.
It was lost. Or forgotten. Or something. Watts' tale of woe, told in a lilting accent that warms the subzero day, has as many twists and turns as the bobsled track he can only stare up at. The bar, alas, won't lend him its sled, which lacks steering and brakes.
"No worries. Things will be better, mon," Watts concludes at the end of each telling.
"It's like a marathoner showing up without sneakers," said one Canadian athlete, laughing and shaking his head.
While Watts' story is unusual, the sight of athletes from warm-weather nations throwing themselves down an icy track no longer is.
Since the 1988 Calgary Games, when the Cool Runnings Jamaicans made a statement, albeit upside down, more and more icy-hot athletes have set their sights on the Winter Olympics. This year, bobsledders and skeleton and luge racers hail from Brazil, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, Iraq, Israel and Greece.
"I call it the Star Trek syndrome," said U.S. skeleton coach Steve Peters, who often acts as their unofficial mentor. "They want to go where no one from their country has gone before. It's not about the medals."
With the sliding sports in the final days of their seasons, the icy-hots are already hat-in-hand to pay for next winter's competition, the one that leads up to the Olympics. They will sell hats and T-shirts, sign posters and photos, give sidewalk rides on sleds with wheels. The Greek team even puts small photos of contributors on the side of its sleds.
"Leave no stone unturned," said John-Andrew Kambanis, a two-time Olympian who is a Chicago financial planner when he isn't piloting Greece's bobsled.
"We're always short of money," said Mexican bobsled driver Roberto Tames, 40, a three-time Olympian. "We know we're not like the Germans or the Swiss teams. There's always people with more money and better looks, but we have heart, and that counts, too."
