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Cooler Runnings -- with results.
That's Terry Holland's humorous take on Michelle Steele's improbable 19-month journey from the warm, sandy beaches of Australia to the icy Italian Alps venue of Cesana Pariol, site of the Feb.16 Winter Olympics women's skeleton competition.
Steele, 19, a former beach flags competitor in the Aussie sport of Surf Lifesaving, will be among 15 starters for the race. It's a female reprise of Jamaica's bid for Olympic glory in men's bobsledding in the 1988 Games in Calgary.
The inexperienced Jamaica team crashed in its Olympic debut, which was later brought to the screen in the movie Cool Runnings. Unlike the Jamaicans 18 years ago, however, Steele has slid onto the scene as a legitimate competitor with two top-six finishes in World Cup competition this season.
Holland, 51, was on the U.S. skeleton team for 22 years and coached the Olympic team that won men's and women's gold medals in 2002. Two years ago, the Australian Institute of Sport lured him out of retirement to develop a women's skeleton team. The sport sends competitors sliding headfirst down a curving ice track at speeds up to 70 mph.
The Institute, whose recruitment of female ex-gymnasts resulted in an aerial skiing gold medal in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, targeted 25 summer athletes from 100 applicants in August2004. The list was cut to 12 in November2004 -- and to four for the 2005-06 World Cup season.
Steele was one of them.
"I didn't even know what skeleton was," she says. "But it was something new and challenging. It was an opportunity to make it to the Olympics in two years."
Steele, from Queensland, was a one-time elite gymnast who started Surf Lifesaving at 9. She mainly competed in beach flags, which requires speed and explosiveness, the essentials of skeleton.
She took to the sport like a kangaroo in the Outback. One month after her first trip down a skeleton track in November2004, Steele finished 13th in worlds in Calgary.
Melissa Hoar, a two-time beach flags world champion who made the final four, remembers that first week. "We were black and blue, top to bottom," she says. "We hit every wall. We had ice burns, bruises, scrapes and stitches. But no one backed down. Not one of us had second thoughts. ... We're reckless junkies."
Her sped-up development has caught the skeleton world by surprise. "It's stunning," says U.S. slider Tristan Gale, who won Olympic gold in 2002. "They had to put in an amazing amount of work to pick up a sport that is technical and requires so much fine-tuning to be so good in two years."
Adds Holland: "Conventional wisdom says you shouldn't be able to do this -- go from ground zero to the Olympics in 19 months. But the Institute and the athletes are saying different."
Steele, who saw snow for the first time in her life in Germany last year, emerged as the winner of AIS' version of skeleton survivor with her team-best No.13 finish on the World Cup circuit. She beat out Hoar, who was 20th, Emma Lincoln-Smith (25th) and Bindee Johnston (37th). To qualify one sled for the Torino Games, the Aussies needed a top-eight finish as a team; they were sixth.
"Prior to skeleton, the most ice these girls have seen were a stack of cubes in a glass," Holland says. "To do what they've done takes stunning courage."
*Making transition to winter sports, 1A
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