Loyalty or Sport? Bakken's Choice Is Gold
P A R K C I T Y, Utah, Feb. 20 -- What would you do?
You devote years helping build a sport from the ice up, begging and bribing operators to get a training run on the track, competing in events where the victors win sausages and laundry detergent, hoping that one day your sport will gain acceptance in the Olympics.
You train for years with a partner who becomes a close friend and together you two become among the world's best at what you do. Then, mere months before the Olympics your performance begins to slip and you face an awful decision.
Do you stick with your partner even though you think it might cost you the Olympic medal that has so long been a goal? Or do you tell your friend you're switching partners?
The gold medal driver of the women's bobsled faced that choice a couple months ago and she chose to drop her partner, placing her Olympic goal over all else.
And the funny thing is, her name is not Jean Racine. It's Jill Bakken, the U.S. bobsledder whose picture isn't on cereal boxes, the Olympian who isn't in credit card commercials.
Hard Lessons Learned
While everyone focused on Racine after she dropped bobsled partner and best friend Jen Davidson, Bakken also dropped her longtime pusher, Shauna Rohbock, a couple months ago and brought in Vonneta Flowers. Tuesday night, Bakken and Flowers won the gold medal with two superb runs in the first women's bobsled competition in Olympics history.
"I'd like to give Shauna a lot of credit," Bakken said. "We were together three years and she was with me today as much as Vonneta when we were going down the track."
As for Racine? The woman who became the poster child for betrayal after she dropped Davidson two months before the Olympics to go with Gea Johnson instead? The woman writers dubbed "Mean Jean"? With Johnson limited by a painful hamstring injury, she drove the sled superbly but finished fifth, one half second away from a medal.
"There were definitely a lot of lessons learned," she said. "I'm 23 years old and this is my first Olympics and it's so hard to do everything right when you're faced with so many decisions. I still consider myself a pioneer in this sport. I think I helped make it what it is. I'm proud of what it is. There are a lot of questions in the media over decisions made and what was right and wrong, but that's for the athletes to decide."
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