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Bobsleigh: Holcomb's USA 1 win's four-man gold
27.02.2010 by
Bobsleigh: Holcomb's USA 1 win's four-man gold
Whistler (AFP) - Steven Holcomb's USA 1 won the United States' first Olympic bobsleigh gold in 62 years on Saturday after their 'Night Train' sleigh bulleted past the field on the Whistler track.
"It's huge, it's great," said Holcomb, who last year became the first American in half a century to win a world title and who arrived at these Games just two years on from sight-saving surgery for a degenerative eye disorder.
He drove his quartet to victory in a combined four-heat time of 3min 24.46sec as Andre Lange's Germany 1 took silver in 3min 24.84sec for a comfortable American winning margin of 0.38sec.
Two-man champion Lange, missing a record third straight gold in the four-man, denied Lyndon Rush's bronze medallists Canada 1 by just 0.01sec.
"I made some mistakes in the two-man. I came back and corrected those and it paid off," said Holcomb, who placed sixth in the two-man, where Lange, whom he greatly admires, took the title.
"He's pushed my game to a better level - competition breeds excellence," said the burly, bearded American.
Lange brakeman Kevin Kuske insisted that all the talk of the track being too dangerous had to be put into perspective.
"Steven proved four times this track is really driveable," said the German after Holcomb drove his crew of Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler and Curtis Tomasevicz to success.
Holcomb, 29, admitted that "it's a tricky track, the fastest in the world. Nowhere else can you train for 95 mph (140 kph) tight curves."
Saturday's drizzly conditions ensured the track was slower than Friday, which saw six crashes, adding to more than a dozen previously in the men's and women's events.
Four teams did not start while five had already withdrawn before the opening heats as the difficulty and sheer speed of the track took a heavy toll.
Holcomb's crew, leading the Canadians by 0.4sec overnight, added another 0.005sec in heat three, by which time the contest was effectively all over.
Lange at least had the satisfaction of the fastest final heat time of 51.36sec, but the margin held for the American quartet who celebrated at the finish, waving their helmets in the air and grabbing a huge Stars and Stripes flag.
The quartet then embraced and exchanged warm handshakes with their fellow podium finishers.
'Smokin' Francis Tyler won the last US bob medal in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 1948.
But Holcomb has shown great consistency on the way to laying to rest those six-decade old ghosts with driving skills that Kuske on Saturday lauded as "super genius".
Many of the teams struggled with one crash on average for every four bobs on Friday on a track which witnessed the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili in pre-tournament training.
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