Fast Sleds, Black Women and Two Decades of Medals

YANQING, China — The full measure of her accomplishments sometimes hits the bobsledder Aja Evans during visits to Chicago elementary schools, where eager students with inquisitive eyes pummel her with questions:

“Do you wear a seatbelt?” “How fast do you go?” “Have you crashed?”

“You know you should really wear a seatbelt, don’t you?”

Evans is a Black woman and an Olympic medalist in a sport unfamiliar to many of the children she meets. But in their questions, Evans senses the same delightful curiosity she once had, a beckoning to venture beyond the norm or the expectations associated with one’s environment.

“This is a sport for everyone,” Evans said. “The more Black people you see, the more you realize that we’re not limited and you have to see it to believe it.”

A generation after the bobsledder Vonetta Flowers wept through the United States’ national anthem in 2002, when she became the first Black athlete to win a gold medal at a Winter Olympics, Black women now make up a majority of America’s Olympic bobsled team.

Seven of the eight members of America’s women’s World Cup bobsled team, in fact, are Black, as are four of the five at the Beijing Olympics. They include Evans; the pilot Elana Meyers Taylor, a three-time Olympic medalist who sought out the sport after watching Flowers win gold but briefly saw her hopes jeopardized by a positive coronavirus test; Sylvia Hoffman, a former college basketball player who once trained to be an Olympic weight lifter; and Kaysha Love, a one-time sprinter discovered in a virtual scouting session.

A medal for one, or several, of them, appears to be in the cards: The United States women have claimed at least one medal in every Games since bobsled was added for women in 2002. But their success also reflects a rethinking of what an American bobsledder looks like, and where they can be found.

“She’s the reason why I’m in bobsled,” Meyers Taylor said. “Looking at her and seeing someone who looks like me, it showed that it was possible. Without her, there’s no way I would have thought winter sport was for people who looked like us.”

Flowers never had that kind of role model.

“Getting into the sport of bobsled, I didn’t know anyone that looked like me,” Flowers said. “And so now that I’ve inspired Elana and she’s inspired the next generation, hopefully this will just inspire a whole new group of people to try a sport they never would have tried.”

Evans, 33, will be an alternate at these Games, which arrive eight years after she made her Olympic debut with a bronze medal in Sochi, Russia. That came two years after her first ride, a trip that remains vivid even now.

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A track star from Chicago’s South Side, Evans was a determined athlete who came from a family full of them. But as she barreled down a track in Lake Placid, N.Y., she quickly realized that having bobsled explained to her paled in comparison to experiencing it. Her pounding heart, she remembers, felt as if it had relocated to somewhere between her chin and her cheeks.

Still, Evans gamely pushed the sled and then hopped in behind her pilot. For the next minute or so, she felt every bump and turn, her body whipping back and forth, as she wondered when the ride would — mercifully — end.

“I don’t know how this qualifies as an Olympic sport,” a wobbly-kneed Evans confided to her mother, Sequocoria Mallory, after climbing out of the sled, slipping into the nearest restroom and calling home. “I don’t know why anybody would sign up for this. I felt like I just got kicked down a hill in a trash can.”

Evans’s family has dabbled at the highest level of nearly every sport. She was a record-setting shot-putter at the University of Illinois. Her father, Fred, became the first Black national collegiate swimming champion at Chicago State in the 1970s. Her brother, also named Fred, played in the N.F.L. Her uncle, Gary Matthews, spent years patrolling Major League Baseball outfields, as did her cousin, Gary Matthews Jr.

But when it came to bobsled, Evans knew only of “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 Disney movie loosely based on the story of Jamaica’s 1988 Olympic team, when her track coach, Mike Erb, suggested she try the sport during her senior year of college.

The idea that she could become an Olympian in a sport she had never tried felt like fiction to her at the time, a dream that she would not allow herself. But then Erb relayed how Flowers had first discovered bobsled, and then come to dominate the sport.

The journey Flowers had already taken, Evans said, “made it a real thing.”

Like Evans, Flowers had once entertained dreams of becoming a track and field Olympian. She competed in the long jump, triple jump and 100-meter dash at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she was a seven-time all-American.

Injuries had paused Flowers’s Olympic hopes until the day her husband, Johnny, spotted a flier encouraging track and field athletes to sample bobsled.

“Thousands of people walked by that sign and really didn’t see it as an opportunity,” Johnny Flowers said, “but it was one of those things where I looked at the qualifications and knew what type of athlete Vonetta was, and I wanted to give her the opportunity to have a chance to go to the Olympics.”

The outreach to track stars was hardly new. Willie Davenport, a 1968 gold medalist in the high hurdles, and Jeff Gadley, a decathlon champion, became the first Black men to compete on a U.S. Winter Olympic team, in 1980. Vonetta Flowers’s success widened the pipeline for track and field athletes to resuscitate their Olympic dreams in a winter sport in which their speed and strength often translated into precisely the kind of power required to push sleds that could weigh several hundred pounds — from a standing start.

But there is still a serious learning curve.

“I really had to transform my body into a totally different person,” Flowers said.

The track star Lauryn Williams transitioned to bobsled after competing in the 4-x-100-meter-relay qualification round at the 2012 London Olympics. Less than two years later, she became the first American woman to win a medal at both the Summer and Winter Games when she and Meyers Taylor won a silver in Sochi.

Yet the sport came at Williams so quickly that she didn’t have much time to learn its history. Flowers’s name kept popping up, she said, and as Williams learned more about Flowers, she came to appreciate what she had done to “pave the way.”

The effect of the American team’s success is expanding. Four Black women from three countries — the United States, Germany and Canada — stood atop the medal podium at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where women’s teams representing Jamaica and Nigeria made their Olympic debuts.

Seun Adigun, the Nigerian team’s captain and driver, entered the sport after watching Evans, her track and field rival in high school and college, compete in Sochi.

“We keep seeing more women of color, people of all color all throughout the world, competing in the sport,” Evans said.

Those changes feel especially important when Evans looks back on her first ride, when the wind was whistling, her heart was pounding and she called her mother afterward unsure what, exactly, she had gotten herself into.

Mallory allowed her Aja to vent for a few minutes. Then she told her to go back up the hill and do it all again.

“I did that,” Evans said, “and I stuck with it. And here we are.”