2018 Winter Olympics: 'Football players are really bobsledders'

Paul Myerberg | USA TODAY

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PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Before he was a bobsledder, Curt Tomasevicz was a football player. He’d even held dreams of reaching the NFL while a reserve middle linebacker at Nebraska, where he lettered four times in early 2000s, but injuries led to a recalibration: Tomasevicz instead left the university as an academic star, earning multiple degrees and, eventually, a teaching post within Nebraska’s College of Engineering.

But between football and academia came the bobsled — and Tomasevicz was a good one, helping the USA’s four-man team win gold at the 2010 Vancouver Games and bronze four years later in Sochi.

He was guided into the sport by a former Nebraska track athlete, Amanda Morley, who approached Tomasevicz in the school’s weight room after the end of his football eligibility and saw the makings of a bobsledder: Tomasevicz was big, strong and athletic, as well as tough enough to handle four years in the middle of the Cornhuskers’ defense.

In other words, he was a linebacker.

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“Football players are really bobsledders,” Tomasevicz said. “They just haven’t really trained for it.”

The sport has seeped into the USA’s two-man and four-man sleds here at the Pyeongchang Games, where five ex-football players have joined a team with realistic hopes of medal contention. In a sport always on the lookout for capable pilots and pushers, football has become one of the prime feeders for Team USA — bobsled demands strength, burst and an intangible sense of grittiness, and footballers fit the bill.

“These guys are freaking beasts,” the USA’s Chris Kinney said of his teammates. “To transition to bobsled, that strength and durability really carries over in this sport, big time.”

Carlo Valdes was a wide receiver and safety at UCLA. Justin Olsen was a tight end at Air Force. Hakeem Abdul-Saboor played running back at University of Virginia at Wise. Evan Weinstock was the Nevada 4A Football Player of the Year at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas. And Sam McGuffie — famous in football circles for his highlight reel as a high school recruit — played running back and wide receiver at Michigan and Rice, and was later a member of the practice squad for the Arizona Cardinals and New England Patriots.

As a bobsledder, “He was blazing fast from the start,” Valdes said of McGuffie.

For these five, bobsled represented the continuation of athletic careers that maxed out, fizzled out or were stymied by injuries. The sport was a logical bridge from the end of one pursuit to the start of another, even down to training sessions grounded in similar exercises: squats, cleans, snatches and the like, familiar lifts for any football player, with the only recognizable change an added emphasis on speed training.

Physically, football players represent the bobsled ideal — muscle-bound, all sinew and swagger, these five brought to the table the size and strength needed to propel roughly half-ton sleds down slippery tracks in speeds exceeding 85 mph.

The key to bobsled is securing momentum, as expressed in a simple mathematical formula. Begin with mass, rarely an issue for any football player. Multiple that by velocity, especially in that initial push from a standing start to the team’s clean entry into the sled. Combined, that captures speed, and speed wins medals.

Put a practice-field blocking sled on wheels — and on ice, for that matter — and you’d see the same result. Some bobsledders are built; football players come ready-made, needing only to be carved out of an existing block of muscle and brawn.

“I just keep the sled accelerating,” McGuffie said. “That’s my job.”

But the real advantage comes in the mental approach: Having taken and delivered hits, tackled and been tackled, bobsledders with a football background are more than ready for the sport’s rough-and-tumble runs.

“You see the guys who play football last a little longer because of the toughness aspect, the grittiness,” Valdes said. “That definitely helped ease the transition for me because I was used to getting bumped around.”

And perhaps unlike athletes from another one of bobsled’s feeder sports, the more individual-focused track and field, football players immediately grasp the team mentality needed for any successful sled. In bobsled as in football, a single false move from any one teammate can offset an otherwise perfect run — an errant step equates to a missed block, in other words, and can ruin runs in the same way the latter can spoil well-designed plays.

“Our football coaches always used to say, ‘Don’t be a hero, you’ve got to do your job.’ So that’s kind of how we are,” Weinstock said. “It’s a team sport, so you’re working with other players who help keep you accountable.”

These lessons remain even as football drifts farther into the past. Weinstock’s career ended in high school, with a torn labrum suffered on a running play leading to a successful track career at Brown University. Valdes played just his freshman year at UCLA before moving into track; Olsen played just one season at Air Force. Abdul-Saboor’s football career blossomed before an ACL tear cost him his senior season.

McGuffie’s name pops off the start list. He was a national recruit coming out of Cypress, Texas, and chose Michigan over a list of major offers before transferring to Rice after his freshman season. He was a strong contributor for the Owls, if playing out of his natural position, but McGuffie’s legacy remains — he was a recruiting supernova, with his highlight film shared in emails and on message boards in the days before Twitter’s widespread growth made every major prospect a national name.

That door closed. Bobsled opened another. The sport’s reputation as an island of misfit toys is rooted somewhat in reality: Bobsled drivers may have deep roots in the event — the USA’s Cody Bascue started sledding on his grandfather’s track as an 8-year-old, for example — but pushers are frequently borrowed from elsewhere.

So it’s here, not in football, that many of the USA’s key bobsledders found their greatest level of success. Instead of touchdowns and tackles, they chase medals. It’s not all that different, in the grand scheme of things.

“This is a dream come true for me,” McGuffie said. “It’s perfect.”