LAKE PLACID, N.Y. - For someone used to going downhill fast, it still stuns Olympic bobsledder Jean Racine how quickly she got to the bottom last winter.
In a blink, the young woman with the bright eyes and quick wit, the athlete with a future paved in endorsements, was turned into a soap opera villain, "Mean Jean," who elbowed aside her teammate and best friend in a greedy grab for the gold.
"I knew I was going to take heat, but when it came ... " her voice trailing off and her lower lip quivering slightly. "I thought it would be painful, but I turned off my emotions and stayed away from the TV. After the Olympics, it was quite painful."
As the World Cup circuit begins today in Calgary, Alberta, Racine is working her way back to the top with the three C's: concentration, commitment and contrition. The first two are likely to erase the memory of her fifth-place Olympic finish and keep her one of the world's premier bobsled drivers. The last one, she hopes, will make her human again to her critics.
Racine is attacking the problem as she does the icy curves of the bobsled track. During her tuneup for international competition at the Olympic Training Complex, she is one of the first on Mount Van Hovenburg in the morning and one of the last to leave as the sun goes down. When she's not taking runs down the mile-long course, she helps around the track.
A tiny person in a sea of massive muscle men, she scoops up stray equipment, shouts encouragement and shares tips with other athletes.
She has been reluctant to re-enter the limelight that she fled last February.
"I took a little down time and disappeared," she acknowledges. "I took a look at some old goals I had before sports took over and decided to focus on what made me happy."
Racine moved from Park City, Utah, to San Diego and took business courses at a junior college. She went to her younger sister's wedding. Then she followed up on an offer from a songwriter and moved to the Washington metro area for a month to write lyrics and record a three-song demo CD in a College Park recording studio.
In short, the woman who once had $500,000 in endorsements and appeared in commercials and on cereal boxes became anonymous.
"It was great. I worked out at a local gym, went to a coffee shop and just talked. I made a lot of new friends and felt normal again," she says of her stay here. "It put a smile back on my face."
The songwriter, Richard "Tazz" Rached, had written and produced CDs of Olympic athletes singing, "Shine," at the 2000 Summer Games, and this year's "All I've Got," that included speed skating gold medalist Derek Parra and Racine. During the Winter Games, he offered to help her make a demo and she accepted in a flash.
"This little person, you'd guess she'd have a Mickey Mouse voice, but she has a big, grown-up voice ... with a pop-country feel to it," Rached says. "She's got the goods."
Racine laughs. "I sing in the shower, which has great acoustics. Being an athlete, I've had lots of time to practice."
Rached wrote the melody and collaborated with Racine on the lyrics.
"We didn't focus on that at all, the hey-let's-tell-people-how-I-felt-when-I-lost," he says of the Olympic controversy. "She'd had enough of it. I'd had enough of it. The public doesn't want to hear it. It was time to move on."
So Racine concentrated on personal housekeeping: a song to thank her friends and supporters, a song about striving for goals and one about her mother, who died last year after a long battle with scleroderma, a rare immune system and connective-tissue disorder.
Cathy Racine was her daughter's biggest fan, urging her to switch from luge to bobsled and paying her way to Utah to train.
In her mother's memory, Racine became active with the Scleroderma Foundation.
Just after the Olympics, she agreed to appear with gold medalists Jonny Moseley, Tristan Gale and Jimmy Shea in an athlete version of The Weakest Link.
"I knew why they wanted me on. I knew [host] Anne Robinson was a mean old lady, but it was a way for me to raise money. I won and got to see that big old fat check for $38,500 go to the foundation," she says.
Difficult choice
Racine was 23 last fall when she and Davidson, 29, met and wowed an eager public. Sponsors and talk show hosts couldn't get enough of Racine, the petite brunet, and Davidson, the leggy blonde. The two-time world champions finished each other's sentences and comforted each other in tough times.
Racine was younger, but more seasoned than Davidson. She also was the driver, which in the quirky world of American bobsledding meant that her word was law.
The season started poorly for both women. Three months after her mother died, Racine's father was arrested on child molestation charges (he pleaded guilty in August). The team began the World Cup season with Davidson recovering from a knee injury.
Their race times rose and their world ranking fell. Barely a week before the Olympic trials last December, Racine told Davidson she was off the team.
Racine said at the time that it was a choice between bringing her best friend, Jen Davidson, to the Winter Games or the best brakeman - Gea Johnson, a track athlete.
But it was more than that. Americans wanted to win and win big on their home turf just four months after 9/11. The U.S. Olympic Committee ratcheted up expectations of gold. Winter Games promoters were selling anything with a scrubbed face wrapped in red, white and blue, and Racine was under pressure to produce.
Bobsled history was on her side. International teams consist of interchangeable parts, swapped by coaches looking for the right combination at the right time. In 1992, American driver Brian Shimer made a last-minute change and named NFL running back Herschel Walker his partner in the two-man competition in Albertville, France. Walker was strong but inexperienced, and the team finished seventh.
Some bobsledders abandoned Racine, but others defended her actions.
"Brakemen are like other equipment. ... Brakemen are a commodity, and if you are the best driver, you get your pick," said Kristi McGihon, an American teammate whose letter of support was published by Sports Illustrated. "As brakemen, we must realize and acknowledge this is our role; the minute we get comfortable or complacent is the minute we lose our spot."
The decision looked like the right one when Racine and Johnson won a silver medal in Calgary in their first race as a team, and then set a track record on the Park City bobsled run in the Olympic trials. But the strategy fell apart when Johnson strained a hamstring just before the Olympic finals.
Racine says U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation rules placed her in a horrible situation.
"There is no reason someone my age should have been making that decision," she says. "I don't think athletes should decide which other athletes are in the sleds. The coaches and federation should."
The federation acknowledged the problem, voting late this summer to transfer team selection authority to the coaches.
Now Racine is on the four-year road back.
"She is someone who deserves a second chance," says her agent, Evan Morganstein. "She got hung out to dry."
But the fact that the 2006 Winter Games will be in Italy, along with the limited visibility of bobsledding and marginal sponsor interest makes an endorsement comeback difficult, say some in the sports marketing business.
"She had a small window in time to make hay," says Bob Williams, president of Burns Sports and Celebrities Inc. "I don't think she's got the platform."
Racine is undeterred.
"This is my life and this is where I belong," she says while clutching her helmet at the top of Lake Placid's track. "I'm not going to worry about the politics. I'm going to be happy."