Bobsled

U.S. bobsledder Pavle Jovanovic was disqualified from the Salt Lake City Olympics after failing a drug test. Jovanovic, 25, of Toms River, N.J., a pusher on the top four-man and two-man sleds of driver Todd Hays, tested positive for a steroid on Dec. 29, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency said yesterday. A replacement was not announced immediately. A three-member panel of the American Arbitration Association will determine later how long he will be suspended from the sport. Jovanovic was tested during the U.S. Olympic Trials in Park City, Utah.

Chicago Bears wide receiver Willie Gault, brushing off the controversy surrounding his addition to the U.S. bobsled team for the Olympics, said yesterday that the dispute would not force him off the team. The late addition of Gault as a side pusher on an alternate four-man bobsled team forced the team to drop Don Lavigne, who postponed his senior year at Harvard to try out for the team, and caused bitterness among some team members. Some hinted of a boycott of the bobsled event as a protest.

Oh, those U.S. bobsledders. Can they do nothing simply? On the day after driver Matt Roy and coach Jeff Jost were seen and overheard having an argument by reporters, they held the final time trials to determine whether or not a four-man sled pushed by Chicago Bears wide receiver Willie Gault would participate in tomorrow's competition. Well, USA III - Gault's sled - turned in the second-fastest combined time yesterday. But USA III didn't beat USA I (Brent Rushlaw driving) or USA II (Roy driving)

It started with a joke. It started with race-car driver Geoff Bodine watching the 1992 Winter Olympics with his family and declaring, after the United States was shut out of a bobsled medal for the ninth straight Games: "They just need a real professional driver. Maybe I should drive a bobsled in the Olympics. " He repeated the joke to a few people, and the next thing Bodine knew he was standing on a hill in Lake Placid, N.Y., climbing in behind driver Bruce Rosselli for a wild ride down the icy track.

An arrest warrant has been issued for Teofilo Stevenson, 49, a three-time heavyweight Olympic boxing gold medalist from Cuba, according to a spokesman for the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office. The office has set the wheels in motion to have Stevenson, a frequent visitor to the United States, nabbed at any port of entry, said Don Ungurait, spokesman for the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor's office wants Stevenson to face charges of aggravated assault and resisting arrest with violence, filed Oct. 23. "If a U.S. Customs agent puts his name through the computer, the open warrant will show up and he'll be taken into custody," Ungurait said.

Herschel Walker pulled his warm-up hood over his head and jammed his gloved hands into his pockets. He stood outside a wooden shed, waiting for bobsleds to be loaded and carried to the top of the hill. The calendar said March, but the weather said January. It was not 9 a.m. yet, and already the temperature was dropping through the 30s. A cold front roiled through the Adirondacks, turning the low sky purple-blue, the color of a beauty-parlor rinse. Snow swirled like confetti. "Football weather," somebody said, and Walker smiled, kicking his feet against the concrete, trying to stamp out the cold.

For some odd reason, the sport of bobsledding attracts athletes from countries that lack two things - namely, winter sports and winter. There is a Jamaican team here at the Winter Olympics, the bob(Marley) sledders. And a Mexican team, the Four Amigos, who practiced on the streets of Dallas by pushing a wooden cart weighted with buckets. And then there is the athlete whose Olympic bloodlines pulse through three generations - Prince Albert of Monaco, son of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace.

As anyone who's visited recently knows, the Franklin Institute runs one of the biggest bait-and-switch games in town. You go there to have fun, to climb on the locomotive and through the heart and see crazy Dr. Seuss-like machines and turn cranks and push buttons and watch sparks fly and, lo and behold, before a half hour's passed, you've picked up something new - about gravity or electricity or aerodynamics. "The Franklin Institute is an indoor playground for kids," says spokesperson Tony Sorrentino.

First a correction. But this one is a little eerie. It was reported yesterday that Herschel Walker, world-class sprinter, NFL running back and currently the main engine on the number-one U.S. two-man bobsled, had been subsisting on a daily diet of bread and fried potatoes. Wrong. Yesterday, in one of the oddest news conferences yet seen in these Games, Walker covered a wide range of topics. His life was the basic theme. One knows not what to make of the things he said.

It took a dozen or so hay bales, blocks of ice, and mountains of snow packed into place with the heel of a shovel to build the course. It was used for coasting - as sledding was called in the 19th century - and it required hours of advance preparation. At the Westtown School, a small Quaker school in Chester County, building the sled run at the first snowfall each winter was both an art and a science. In the late 1800s, the course was famous for its length - it extended nearly a quarter-mile - and for the sharp curve placed in the midst of a grove of trees.

The United States team, including Olympic 100-meter hurdler Lolo Jones , won gold Sunday in the combined bobsled-skeleton team event at the world championships in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Jones was brakewoman for Elana Meyers in the women's bobsled portion of an event that also added times in two-man bobsled plus men's and women's skeleton. The U.S. team edged Germany by 0.24 seconds even though the Germans won three of four disciplines on the Olympia track. Skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace was 1.7 seconds faster than German rival Marion Thees to lead the United States to victory with an overall time of 4 minutes, 31.29 seconds.

Forrest "Dew Drop" Morgan, 90, a national bobsled champion and former manager of the U.S. Olympic team, has died Saturday in Lake Placid, N.Y. Born in Saranac Lake, N.Y., in 1922, Mr. Morgan attended the bobsled races at the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, getting a ride on the shoulders of American gold medalist Billy Fiske, and was hooked. After serving as a bombardier in World War II and the Korean War, Mr. Morgan started sliding actively in the 1950s and won the national championship as a brakeman in 1959 with neighbor Tuffy Latour.

A week after winning the two-man gold at the world championships, Steven Holcomb was the class of the field in four-man bobsled Sunday in Lake Placid, N.Y. Holcomb and his crew finished a half-second ahead of Maximilian Arndt of Germany. The American's triumph last week in two-man was a first for the United States at worlds since two-man began in 1931. Only two other pilots have ever completed a sweep. Lindsey Vonn won a World Cup Super G in Bansko, Bulgaria, to become the career leader in the discipline.

As a German team raced to the lead in the two-man bobsled competition at Cesana yesterday, the United States and several other countries were considering protests over the possibility that illegal sleds were used by the Germans. Germans Andre Lange and Kevin Kuske led the field after two runs, with the final two runs scheduled today. The top American duo, Todd Hays and Pavle Jovanovic, ranked sixth. "I don't know what the deal is, but they're just absolutely flying," Jovanovic, a native of Toms River, N.J., said of the Germans.

I had the most exhilarating and frightening 51.48 seconds of my life on the Comet, the four-man bobsled ride at Utah Olympic Park. When my wife and I had the opportunity to visit Park City, Utah, last year for the Sundance Film Festival, we jumped at the chance. Before we left on our trip, my wife was most excited about planning which films we would see, whereas I was most excited about planning my bobsled ride. I didn't even think twice about it. I love roller-coasters - how could the Olympic bobsled be much different?

Todd Hays and the United States 1 team won a four-man bobsled World Cup race yesterday in Cortina D'Ampezzo, Italy. Hays, Pavle Jovanovic, Bill Schuffenhauer and Steve Mesler clocked the fastest time in both runs at the Eugenio Monti track for a combined time of 1 minute, 44.86 seconds. Germany's Matthias Hoepfner and Switzerland's Martin Annen led their teams to a tied second place. Annen leads the World Cup overall standings with 325 points after four events. Italy's Max Blardone and Davide Simoncelli finished 1-2 in a World Cup giant slalom in Alta Badia, Italy.

The finish line of the bobsled run at Bear Hollow last night looked like Times Square at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. The drivers, pushers, brakemen and coaches of the two sleds representing the United States made the most noise. They hugged and high-fived everyone in the area, and they hadn't even won the Olympic four-man bobsled medal. That didn't really matter, however. For the first time since 1956, a U.S. men's bobsled had won a medal in the Winter Olympics.

Todd Hays can end 46 years of slips, slides and sunken feelings for U.S. men's bobsled in his next 90 or so seconds on ice. Hays drove the USA-1 bobsled into first place yesterday after the first two heats of the four-man event, and with a couple of more strong runs he might finally end a U.S. men's medal drought dating to 1956. "We're excited and happy," said brakeman Garrett Hines, who twice has missed winning a medal by the blink of an eye. Hays, a former linebacker at Tulsa, blasted down the Utah Olympic Park course in 1 minute, 33.26 seconds.

Through all the drama and heartbreak that rode down the track aboard the No. 1 U.S. women's bobsled, the driver of that "other sled" for the host nation at the Winter Olympics stayed prepared, focused and determined. Jill Bakken, the pilot of USA 2, had waited a lifetime for this opportunity. Last night, paired with Vonetta Flowers, the first black athlete from any country ever to win a gold medal in the Winter Olympics, she performed the two runs of her career at Utah Olympic Park and outshined her more publicized teammates to win the first-ever gold medal in women's bobsled.

The soap opera that is U.S. women's bobsled had threatened to take another unexpected turn, but the principals involved say everything is going to be all right. Gea Johnson, the controversial choice of driver Jean Racine to be the brakeman on the U.S. No. 1 sled, aggravated a left hamstring injury during Saturday's training runs. Johnson participated in only one of Sunday's two practice runs and did not push at full speed. A spokeswoman for the U.S. bobsled team said yesterday that Johnson was undergoing treatment and should be ready by the time the Olympic debut of the two-woman bobsled competition gets under way late this afternoon at Utah Olympic Park in Park City, Utah.