It's not just Jamaica with a 'Cool Runnings' story. There are sliders from all over the world now

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. (AP) — It doesn’t snow in Jamaica. Or Malta. Or Ghana. There’s been a maybe dusting reported on rare occasions in parts of Thailand and Malaysia. And nobody thinks of Spain, Colombia, Israel, Brazil and Taiwan as winter sports superpowers.

They’re all sliding anyway.

Those 10 nations — with a combined five Winter Olympic medals between them over the years, all won by Spain — were part of a record turnout of 38 nations over the last two weeks at the world bobsled and skeleton championships in Lake Placid, a sign that the sports are still growing. It’s expected that some of the athletes from those nations, even without a sliding track in their homelands and not within thousands of miles of those countries in some cases, will compete at the Olympics next winter.

“I’m really happy that more nations are here, and this sport is growing,” said Adanna Johnson, a 17-year-old women’s bobsled pilot from Jamaica after she finished the monobob race in Lake Placid last week. “I think one of the reasons is for the Olympics, they only allow for three sleds from the bigger nations to compete and that kind of allows smaller nations to get bumped up in the rankings.”

True, there are spots set aside at the Olympics for nations that are developing teams to compete on the sport’s biggest stage. That’s why there have been sliders from American Samoa, Bermuda, Greece, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, Tonga and the Virgin Islands in the games over the years.

Skeleton athlete Jonathan Yaw wants to add Malaysia to that list. He’s a former handball player from Australia who slides for Malaysia — the country where he was born and his father’s homeland — in large part because of a legacy program established in southeast Asia to promote winter sports after the 2018 Pyeongchang Games.

Yaw finished 29th at the world championships last week. Out of 29 sleds, that is. He wasn’t bothered and showed some progress; for example, he beat 2018 Olympian and 2026 hopeful Akwasi Frimpong of Ghana in their final run of the event.

“We have some good ambassadors for our sport,” Yaw said. “And, you know, in sport, sometimes you get the arrogance and the cockiness. I want to show people that you can be humble. You can just put your head down and work hard and still achieve good results and be a good role model for kids.”

Yaw has had some success, and there’s a young girl in Lake Placid who has proof of that. She’s the owner of the first medal Yaw ever won in a North American Cup race and wore it to the event’s opening ceremony last week. He gave it to her to plant a seed, he hopes.

“She actually started skeleton in Lake Placid because of that medal and because she met me,” Yaw said. “That brings me to tears. If I can do that for one kid, then on a platform like the Olympics or world championships hopefully I’ll be able to do much more.”

Shannon Galea — who works for the Canadian Olympic Committee — is now a skeleton slider representing Malta through the heritage of her father and grandparents. She trains when she can in Lake Placid now and has athletes from Malta and other places reaching out for guidance on how they can try to become Olympians.

Like Yaw, she was last in the women's worlds race.

“Last place is not fun,” Galea said. “But I'm fortunate. A lot of athletes in the field are supportive.”

She was a star athlete in a slew of sports growing up. Softball was probably her best game; she was a pitcher throwing at high speeds, and now she finds herself sliding headfirst down mountains at even faster speeds — she topped out in Lake Placid last week around 72 mph — to chase that Olympic hope.

“I played five varsity sports,” Galea said. “This is not a varsity sport. This is, ‘go out there and be psycho.’”

The sliding sports have some traditional powers. Germany has long been the world's most successful nation, whether the sport is bobsled, skeleton or luge. The U.S. — with Kaysha Love in monobob and the mixed skeleton team of Austin Florian and Mystique Ro — was the lone nation to win more than one gold in Week 1 of the world championships. Austria, Italy, Britain, Switzerland, Latvia and Canada are also among the nations that are traditionally strong.

China is coming, bolstered by massive investment in its programs around the 2022 Beijing Games. Brazil had a slider — Nicole Rocha Silveira — win two women's skeleton World Cup medals this season and finish fourth at the world championships. Ukraine nearly got its first skeleton medal at a world championships this year as well, with Vladyslav Heraskevych finishing fourth.

“We're showing what can happen if you believe,” Heraskevych said. “And if you fight.”

This phenomenon of sliding-sport dreamers might have really taken off as a novelty when Jamaica sent a bobsled team to the 1988 Calgary Olympics — a story that was turned into the 1993 movie “Cool Runnings.” The movie is largely fictionalized but is still the most recognizable part of the Jamaica bobsled story.

Johnson was a gymnast when she was recruited into sliding. She didn't know what “Cool Runnings” was. And now she's living her own version of the story, after finally seeing the movie.

“They made us watch it,” Johnson said. “I had no idea what it was like.”

___

AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/sports

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