Bobsledders lose leader
Team will be thinking of three-time medalist Steven Holcomb, who died eight months ago.
U.S. team is still dealing with death of Steven Holcomb.
The inside of an Olympic bobsled can be a violent place, loud and jostling at 90 mph, subject to oppressive gravitational forces through each banked turn.
But when Steve Langton thinks back on his years of racing with teammate Steven Holcomb, he remembers quieter times.
Their car rides to practice with music playing over the radio. Or the moments before they won a bronze medal in the two-man event at the 2014 Winter Games.
“He and I didn’t say one word to each other,” Langton recalls. “We both knew what we needed to do.”
Eight months have passed since Holcomb died in his sleep at a Lake Placid, N.Y., training site with a fatal combination of alcohol and sleeping pills in his system.
The 37-year-old ranked among the world’s top bobsled pilots, winning three Olympic medals and 10 world championships. Though he had made no secret of past battles with depression — including a suicide attempt — news of his death rocked the sports world.
Now, in his absence, Langton and the rest of the U.S. bobsled team must find a way to regroup as they head to the 2018 Winter Games without the man who always led them to victory.
“I mean, it’s going to be tough,” Langton says. “Steve had such quiet confidence.”
In the months leading up to the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, team members have met regularly with Alex Cohen, a U.S. Olympic Committee psychologist.
“The one thing that’s important for athletes and coaches to know is that
[Holcomb, [mourning] is a completely natural emotion,” Cohen says. “You don’t need to rush through it.”
Grief isn’t the only issue. The U.S. men are no longer medal favorites without Holcomb.
The pilot is the key member of any two- or four-man team. After the scrambling push start, he hops into the front seat and grabs hold of D-rings attached to steering ropes.
Top pilots must remain calm in hectic circumstances, feeling their way down the track, aiming for the fastest lines while steering as subtly as possible to avoid friction that can cost precious hundredths of a second. The slightest mistake can send the sled out of control.
“You have to push it to the edge if you want to win,” Holcomb once said. “A lot of drivers play it safe and don’t push it like that, but those aren’t the best drivers.”
The Americans have qualified three sleds in both the two- and four-man events in Pyeongchang. Two of the pilots, Justin Olsen and Codie Bascue, will be making their Olympic debut at the helm.
The new guys must guard against trying too hard. “Feeling the pressure to fill the shoes of one of the best bobsled pilots ever is an issue,” Cohen says. “That’s something we attend to as frequently as we can.”
It won’t be easy, because Holcomb’s legacy is daunting. At the 2010 Vancouver Games, he ended the country’s 62-year medal drought in the four-man event, driving the “Night Train” sled to gold. Four years later, at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, he won bronze in the four-man and ended another 62-year dry spell — this time in the twoman — with a bronze.
“If anyone else has a 62year medal drought you need to break, let me know,” he says. “I’ll help you.”
There was more to his story than just victories on the track.
Through his early years in the bobsled program, Holcomb
‘He was somebody I looked to throughout my career for advice because I respected his opinion.’ — Justin Olsen, U.S. bobsledder, on Steven Holcomb
learned to be a pilot while suffering from keratoconus, an eye disease that causes the cornea to thin out and bulge, leading to streaked or blurred vision.
This condition forced him to drive by touch and not visual cues. He was known for meticulously walking the track before races, memorizing each line and curve.
As the disease worsened, threatening to render him legally blind, Holcomb battled depression. In 2007, he shut himself inside a Colorado Springs hotel room and washed down 73 sleeping pills with Jack Daniel’s.
“No way was I supposed to wake up,” he wrote in his autobiography, “But Now I See.” “The next day I opened my eyes.”
The public did not know of his attempted suicide until he wrote about it years later. In the meantime, the USOC and USA Bobsled & Skeleton found Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler, a Beverly Hills ophthalmologist who had developed a nonsurgical treatment for keratoconus.
The procedure — which was subsequently renamed the “Holcomb C3-R” — restored Holcomb’s vision.
“Going from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs,” the bobsledder said, “it was such a surreal moment.”
Olsen recalls joining the program around that time and, like most new push athletes, trying to win a spot on Holcomb’s sled because “Steve was the best.”
But Holcomb was more than just the top pilot. As push athlete Evan Weinstock puts it, he was “the heart of this program.”
Strong and stout, Holcomb never hesitated to help the other American pilots, even as they competed against him on the World Cup circuit.
When Olsen was thinking about enlisting in the military and joining the Army’s World Class Athlete Program, which allows soldiers to compete while they serve, he turned to Holcomb.
“I’ve asked Steve so many questions,” Olsen said. “He was somebody I looked to throughout my career for advice because I respected his opinion.”
The 2016-17 season had drawn to a close when Holcomb was discovered in his room in May.
An initial examination listed pulmonary congestion as a possible cause of death; a subsequent toxicology report noted the combination of sleeping pills and a 0.18% blood-alcohol level.
The Essex County, N.Y., coroner drafted a more-detailed news release but canceled plans to make the statement public after Holcomb’s family complained that it included “speculation beyond the scope of the toxicology report.”
“Anyone who knew Steven knew what a private person he was despite being a public figure,” the family said in a statement. “Our intentions were to continue to respect his privacy, even in death.”
His teammates, many of whom had returned to their homes in other parts of the country, reconvened in Lake Placid for a memorial. Weinstock says: “That was really important.”
In the months since then, it has been hard to avoid the memories.
September brought everyone back together for training. Then came the new racing season.
In late November, the Russian pilot who won two gold medals in Sochi was retroactively disqualified for violating anti-doping rules. Officials announced that Holcomb’s team would be bumped up a spot and issued silver medals in the two- and four-man events.
“It’s going to be weird for his family,” U.S. veteran Chris Fogt told the Associated Press. “And it’s going to be weird for us.”
Cohen, the psychologist, suspects that team members might think of Holcomb whenever they race. He has suggested they “find a way to make it a celebration of his life rather than simply mourning.”
That’s what Langton tries to do. A smile often crosses his face when he reminisces about those car rides and the days spent hanging around the track. He also reminds himself about how much Holcomb loved to race.
When bobsled begins at the Olympic Sliding Center in Pyeongchang next month, he will ride behind the promising young Bascue in the four-man event. They will keep Holcomb in mind.
“He would want us going out there and trying to win every single race,” Langton says. “Because that’s what he lived his life doing.”