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This Day In Sports…February 13, 1988:
The 15th Winter Olympics kick off with Opening Ceremonies in Calgary, Alberta. The Games were dominated by the Soviet Union and East Germany, as they finished first and second, respectively, in the final medal standings. The hosts from Canada would have a disappointing games, as they failed to win a gold medal. Canada would have to wait until the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver to win the country’s first ever winter gold on home soil.
These Olympics became just as well-known for popular underdogs Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards of Great Britain in ski jumping and the Jamaican bobsled team. Edwards tried ski jumping as a teenager, because there was virtually no one else in England doing it. Then he became the first athlete ever to represent Britain in ski jumping. Despite finishing dead last in both the 70-meter and 90-meter events at Calgary, Edwards held the British ski jumping records for the next 13 years.
Edwards was far-sighted, and the thick glasses he wore underneath his googles became his signature. His fame spawned a movie, “Eddie The Eagle,” in 2016. It took a lot of liberties with Eddie’s story, but it was true that he was working at a mental hospital in Finland that winter to make some money, and that’s where he found out he had qualified for the Olympics. The adult Eddie was played by Taron Egerton, and his coach was played by Hugh Jackman. The film received generally good reviews. I liked it, anyway.
The Jamaican bobsled team also inspired a successful movie, “Cool Runnings” in 1993, starring John Candy. It was an obvious novelty that a country with a tropical climate was entering a team in a winter sport, but the start is half the battle in bobsled, and good sprinters have a distinct advantage. Jamaica has plenty of those. In Calgary, the four-man Jamaican team crashed in its third run and did not finish. (But the two-man team did come in 30th out of 41 teams.)
Unlike Eddie The Eagle, who tried and failed to qualify for the next three Olympics, the Jamaican bobsled team would return to the Winter Games. The four-man crew finished 25th at Albertville in 1992, and a surprising 14th at Lillehammer, beating the U.S., Russia, Australia and France. The Jamaicans would then finish 21st at Nagano in 1998 before a 24-year hiatus from Olympic competition. They made it back for the Beijing Games in 2022 and were 28th in the four-man event.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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