BC-OLY--BOB-Jamaicans Return,1st Ld-WritethruNothing easy for Jamaican bobsled team

More than two decades later, the story hasn’t changed for the fabled Jamaican bobsled team.

A handful of young men from the Caribbean island nation, all physically blessed with speed and power, embark on an Olympic odyssey. Unable to quickly fulfill their quest in track, they put their disdain for ice and snow aside and become intrigued by bobsledding, where a lack of funding and access to the right equipment impede their progress and threaten to derail their hopes.

You’ve heard this before, right?

Only this isn’t the Disney movie that offered a somewhat-fictionalized version of the 1988 Jamaican team and its path to the Calgary Games. This is very real for a new generation of Jamaican sledders, a group that cringes at any “Cool Runnings” parallels and insists that not only are they serious about their sport – but that maybe they’re good enough to surprise at the Vancouver Olympics.

“People do not understand: This is my passion. This is our passion,” said Hannukkah Wallace, the team’s driver. “I really want to get an Olympic medal. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. I really, really, really need it. And if they ask me about the movie, I tell them, the movie was a comedy, but our crashes are real.”

So against all odds, here they go again. Get ready, Vancouver: The Jamaicans are coming.

“I think a lot of people might believe that it’s sort of an amusement park ride to the Olympics,” said Stephen Samuels, who represents the Jamaican Bobsleigh Federation. “I don’t know how to describe it to you, other than this. This is their life. They are serious athletes.”

Indeed, these guys run in some serious circles.

For starters, at a recent commercial shoot for Puma, Wallace and pushman Marvin Dixon tried to get a certain old track buddy of theirs into the bobsled.

No chance – Olympic track hero Usain Bolt turned them down flat.

“We asked him,” said Dixon, who was a 400- and 800-meter runner in Jamaica before becoming a sledder. “He just said, ‘Cold. No.’ ”

But there is hope for the team: The Jamaicans showed steady progress in the years after Calgary, and Lascelles Brown, who pushed sleds for Jamaica from 1999 until 2004, helped Canada win a silver medal in two-man bobsledding at the 2006 Turin Olympics.