Las Vegas’ Evan Weinstock barrels his way into Olympic bobsledding

When some of us were kids, bobsled was a sport mostly shown on two-week tape delay in black-and-white. It usually was on "Wide World of Sports" when Jim McKay still sported a crew cut.

He would talk about guys named Horst and Wolfgang and Gustav, and then a bobsled would come hurtling down the side of a mountain making a clamorous racket. Once in awhile one would fly right off. It seemed East Germany or Switzerland always won.

Then about 25 years ago, Irv Blitzer and Derice Bannock and Sankie Coffee and Junior Bevil, et al, changed the face of bobsled racing.

They were characters in a 1993 movie called "Cool Runnings" loosely based on Jamaica sending a bobsled team to the 1988 Winter Olympics. It showed that sprinters and athletes from other sports would make fine pushers on bobsled teams during their off-seasons.

It opened the door for Herschel Walker, and Lolo Jones with the high cheekbones, and now Evan Weinstock of Las Vegas to come hurtling down a serpentine track made of ice at 90 mph, their heads tucked low into a flimsy carbon fibre tube while muttering expletives and supplications about flying right off the mountain.

Evan Weinstock had been a wide receiver, the best football player in the city, the 4A Player of the Year at Del Sol High. He also was smarter than one of those kids who wins the ESPN spelling bee. So he went to Brown, which is in the Ivy League. The coaches at Brown said he could play football and run track during the 15 minutes when he wasn't studying biology.

Weinstock mostly ran track. He liked track as well as field, so he signed up for the decathlon. He was Ivy League champion in the decathlon three times; he also won the indoor heptathlon.

While he was contemplating med school, Stanford offered him a gig as a volunteer assistant track coach. That got him out of Rhode Island where it's cold and snows a lot. It also led to him trying out for the U.S. bobsled team.

In November, Weinstock and his driver, a guy with an unkempt beard named Codie Bascue, came hurtling down the mountain at the North American Cup near Calgary in Canada. After muttering expletives and supplications, Weinstock and Bascue did not fly off the mountain. Not only did they make it to the bottom, they won.

True, they only had to beat the Canadians and the other U.S. sleds — and the Jamaicans.

(Weinstock met the Jamaican bobsledders; he said they are pretty much like the ones portrayed in the movies. He didn't party with them, though.)

Beating the Canadians in bobsled isn't exactly like beating the Canadians in hockey, or beating them in curling. Canada has never won an Olympic gold medal in two-man bobsled. The last time the U.S. won was in 1936. Hell didn't freeze over that year, just the bobsled run in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria.

So now Weinstock is solidly entrenched with the No. 3 U.S. sled. Only two U.S. sleds will get to come hurtling down the mountain at the Winter Games in PyeongChang in 2018. But Weinstock said if the No. 3 sled can shave a few hundredths off their time between now and then, the No. 3 sled could become the No. 2 sled.

It goes without saying that would be an icy thrill for a kid from the desert who had mostly only seen snow on TV and Christmas cards before going to college. He's not as famous as Herschel Walker, or Lolo Jones, or even Codie Bascue, the bobsled driver with the unkempt beard. But they're starting to learn his name in Lake Placid and Park City and Innsbruck and St. Moritz.

"It's always been the biggest goal," Weinstock said of the Olympics over latte at Starbucks last week. "To represent my country on the highest level would truly be an honor. Especially being from Las Vegas in a sport like bobsled — it goes to show you can do anything if you put your mind to it."

He said there is a word that best describes hurtling down the side of an icy mountain at 90 mph in a sled that is not exactly well-appointed, as they said in those Chrysler commercials. That word is "violence."

"It's like being in a trash can and getting kicked down a hill," Weinstock said. "I try to hold on for dear life. Hopefully, I can make it to the bottom."

At the top, as he was getting ready to come hurling down the mountain for a training run, the rookie from the desert and the Ivy League tells a story about his driver seeing something in their sled, and of reaching his hand inside. Nuts and bolts were tossed into a snowbank.

Evan Weinstock said he almost fell for it. But he made it to the bottom, and unlike in the movies, both runners stayed on. Irv Blitzer would have been proud.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski