bobsledders

In the 1930's, as the world slid towards war, speed was all the rage. Bobsledding, the fastest, most thrilling sport of the era, was the must-see event at the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. The competition required exceptional skill and extraordinary courage because the course was so lethal. The American team was composed of a ragtag lot---Clifford Gray,a notorious playboy and ex-movie star; Eddie Eagan, a heavyweight boxing champion, scholar, and lawyer; Jay O'Brien, a handsome Gatsby-ish gambler and rogue; and Billy Fiske, a boy just barely out of his teens, who would quickly become the star of the sport. They faced fierce competition from the very same German athletes they would be fighting against in World War II only a few years later. Billy Fiske joined the British Royal Air Force and fought during the Battle of Britain and became the first American fighter pilot killed in the war.

At speeds approaching 100 miles per hour, a series of hairpin turns, and downhill declines, bobsledding is a sport for the fearless. Steven Holcomb is one of the world's top athletes and he finished sixth in the 2006 Olympics. But Steve had a secret he was afraid to share. In the prime of his athletic career, he was diagnosed with keratoconus, a degenerative eye disease leaving one in four people blind without a cornea transplant, and even with a transplant the results may not be perfect. When he finally told his coach, he underwent a revolutionary new treatment, C3-R, that restored his sight to 20/20. Holcomb and his team and sled, The Night Train, then went on to become the first American bobsledders since 1948 to win the Olympic gold medal at Vancouver in 2010.