Tough sledding: Three U.S. bobsled teams vie for two spots

Ask any American female bobsled driver, and she'll look you straight in the eye and tell you this about the battle to win a spot on the 2006 U.S. Olympic Team: It isn't personal.

It just looks, sounds and feels that way.

Not that any of this can be helped, given the cold reality of the numbers: Three U.S. drivers — upstart Shauna Rohbock, the recently married Jean (Racine) Prahm and Kirkland's Jill Bakken, the defending gold medalist — rank among the top five in the world today. But only two can drive at the upcoming Olympic Games in Turin, Italy — the two with the most World Cup race points on Jan. 16.

It gets worse: Riding shotgun with those three are six talented brakemen — the engines behind the sleds — any of whom, on a given date, also might be the best in the world. Only three — one each for the number one and two sleds, plus an alternate — will make the Olympic trip.

Add to that a lot of lava-hot resentment still simmering from the same team-selection process before the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games, and you've got a potential explosion on your hands.

Much to the relief of coaches and bobsled officials, no fissures have erupted — yet. This competition, with the first two women's World Cup races in the bag, has been fought exclusively on the track, with all three ultra-competitive drivers continuing to say all the right things about unity and overall team strength.

But let's face it: While they're wearing the same-colored skin suits and helmets, America's elite bobsled-racing women are at every opportunity trying to drive their teammates right off the track. Not only every minute up until the team is selected, but in the Olympics, as well.

Bakken, 28, the Lake Washington High School grad whose 2002 gold-medal run with brakeman Vonetta Flowers was one of the great underdog stories of the Salt Lake Olympics, puts the pre-Games tussle in context:

"The biggest race was just to get to the Games," she says. "After that, I could just relax and have fun."

Her gold-medal run "was the easiest race of the season," she says.

The competition is even more fierce this year.

"There are three teams that should be at the Games," says Bakken, who wouldn't be going to Turin if the decision was made today. "One of us isn't going, and they're still going to be one of the best in the world. That's kind of a hard pill to swallow. But that's just the way it is."

Always has been. Recall, if you will, the pushing and shoving leading up to the '02 Olympics: Drivers Racine and Bakken ditched longtime brakemen and close friends Jen Davidson and Rohbock, respectively, only weeks before the Salt Lake Games.

Rohbock, though shocked by the decision made by her longtime sliding partner and former Army basic training buddy (she and Bakken are National Guard members), quietly accepted her fate, and says she and Bakken remain friends.

But Davidson, humiliated after she and Racine had already pitched themselves as best-buddy Olympians in national media, protested loudly and publicly. Observers — OK, it was me; someone had to do it — promptly assigned Racine the "Mean Jean" nickname, and, much to her chagrin, it stuck. Result: the then-new Olympic sport of women's bobsled was placed in what Prahm (née Racine) refers to as a "cat fight" that it has yet to fully escape.

For U.S. bobsledding, much of the hurt went away with the gold medal for Bakken and Flowers, who became the first black athlete from any nation to win Winter Games gold. Racine slid to a disappointing fifth when, fittingly, her replacement brakeman, Gea Johnson, pulled up lame with a hamstring injury.

Many lessons were learned, and for Rohbock, one was obvious: If you don't want to be left at the curb, you get your own car. So after Salt Lake, she switched from the back seat to the front. "As soon as I started sliding, I wanted to become a driver," said Rohbock, 28, a former college heptathlete and professional soccer player who lives and trains in Park City, Utah. "It's kind of hard to be a brakeman, to have zero control. It's like getting in a trashcan and being rolled downhill."

Rohbock added that she realizes now, as a driver, that choosing an Olympic teammate is a "horrible position to be in."

With only four years' driving experience under her belt (Prahm, by comparison, has 13), Rohbock is an underdog in the Turin medal chase. But she has some distinct inside edges. Among them are the consistently fastest start times on the team — and the track record on the Olympic course at Cesana Pariol, Italy.

Bakken, 28, has hardly begun to consider the Turin Games, focusing instead on the week-to-week racing that could get her there — or leave her the lone woman standing without a bobsled seat when the music stops this time around.

That choice, at least, will be purely based on results. The two drivers heading to Turin will be the two with the best World Cup record after the sixth race of the season, Jan. 13, in Germany.

With two of those six races in the books, Rohbock and partner Valerie Fleming stand second in the world. Prahm, 27, and Flowers, 32, who have been a consistent team since shortly after Salt Lake, are third. Bakken, who has been alternating between brakemen Amanda Moreley of Auburn and Bethany Hart of Connecticut, ranks fifth.

That could all change in the next six weeks. And once the drivers are in place, the real fun begins.

The two winning drivers, with "consultation" from coaches, then select their partners — and not necessarily the ones who got them to the dance. Prahm and Rohbock have said publicly they'll take Flowers and Fleming, respectively, if they're on the team. Bakken says she's likely to pick between Hart and Moreley — a track standout at Auburn High School and in college at Nebraska — by the end of the year.

Rohbock says the coaches' influence is a double standard: Male drivers, she notes, get to pick their own brakemen all by themselves.

Bottom line?

"This women's team is really deep," says coach Bill Tavares, the diplomat caught in the middle of it all. "Any one of the women can win a medal in Turin and on any given track along the way."

And once again, somebody with a lot of talent, ambition and passion for going really fast down an icy mountain will be left home, simmering, watching it all unfold on TV.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com.