Dreaming of bobsled gold to share with hometown
Published: November 23, 2009, 12:30 am
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Steve Mesler can’t help thinking what he plans to do if his dreams, his fantasies, turn into gold in February.
That’s if he and his three teammates win the gold—or any—medal for the United States in the four-man bobsled competition in February at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Mesler, proudly Buffalo born and bred, wants to bring that medal back home, and he and his teammates are certainly headed in the right direction. Sunday, the team — driver Steve Holcomb, pushers Mesler and Justin Olsen, and brakeman Curtis Tomasevicz — won the World Cup four-man bobsled championship in Lake Placid.
Nothing would make Mesler happier than putting an Olympic medal in the hands of the relatives, friends and supporters in Buffalo who have been behind him for almost 15 years, first as a decathlete at the University of Florida and then as a bobsledder for the last nine years.
“I’ve thought for so many years, ‘I can’t wait to come back home with a medal,’ ” he said between training runs in Lake Placid last week. “It gets me excited, and my heart starts pumping, when I think about coming back to Buffalo and letting [supporters] feel the medal in their hands.”
Mesler, a 1996 City Honors School graduate, will be home for a couple of days before the Olympics, to attend a fundraiser for him and his bobsled team. The event, Buffalo Slides for Gold, will be held from 6 to 9 p. m. Tuesday in the Irish Center at 245 Abbott Road in South Buffalo.
The U. S. Bobsled Federation has supported the team, but Mesler and his crew have decided to train in Europe for the holidays, so the federation will not pay the team’s additional training expenses.
That’s why his supporters, Team Mesler, have organized the fundraiser and lined up key sponsors such as the Buffalo Sabres and Bills. Anyone can sign up for the event by logging on to his Web site, www.stevemesler.com . Mesler has lived outside Buffalo for 13 years, since his high school graduation. But you can’t take the Buffalo out of him. He shared his family’s Bills season tickets from 1988 through 1995, and you can hear the pain in his voice over the team’s current woes.
The 31-year-old Mesler already has been on the Ralph Wilson Stadium turf, after having won a community-service award as a City Honors student. He also can envision stepping to center ice in HSBC Arena, perhaps with a certain medal draped around his neck.
“I want to drop the puck at a Sabres game,” he said.
Mesler is a finely tuned, chiseled athlete, 6-feet-2 and 213 pounds, with 7 percent body fat. He has run the 40-yard dash in the low 4-second range, and he has dead-lifted 575 pounds.
His sport, like few others, puts a premium on both speed and strength, as sleds hurtle down the ice at 95 mph, with tenths or hundredths of a second meaning the difference between gold and other medals, or no medal at all.
Sports Illustrated, in a recent article on the four-man U. S. bobsled team, described Mesler as the “team’s fastest member” and explained his role as the third one to hop onto the sled.
“The three spot is the trickiest, requiring an athlete with the strength to push the sled but the body control to make a surgical entry into it,” the article stated. “He must refrain from tugging on the sled, which would decelerate it, and make sure not to land too heavily, lest he cause the sled to bounce.”
Sounds a lot trickier than navigating a sled down a hill in Delaware Park, a long snowball toss from Mesler’s boyhood home on Potomac Avenue.
The idea of the American four-man bobsled team, USA 1 — better known as Team Night Train — winning Olympic gold is hardly a pipe dream. In addition to Sunday’s World Cup victory, Mesler, Holcomb, Olsen and Tomasevicz won the world championships in March in Lake Placid, the first such U. S. title in 50 years.
Mesler, an avid poker player, hemmed and hawed a bit when asked if his team goes into the Olympics as the favorite.
“As much as I hate to say it, we’re one of the favorites,” he said before quickly citing other strong contenders — almost everyone but the Jamaican bobsled team. “When you’re at the top, it’s fun. It’s enjoyable. We savor it. But it’s more fun to be the underdog.”
These Olympics could be Mesler’s last hurrah at the top of his sport. He acknowledges that it might be attractive to slide off into retirement with a medal, but he’s unsure what life after bobsledding holds for him. He knows he wants to mentor and motivate young people, teaching them about the drive and leadership that have gotten him so far.
Mesler keenly hopes that the recent world championships and the upcoming Olympics will help his sport — and allow his hometown to puff out its chest in pride.
Of course, Buffalo’s not New York City or Los Angeles, he notes. He knows about the bumps and bruises to Western New Yorkers’ egos, from the city’s snow-drift image to its economic woes to the Bills’ troubles. He knows how prideful the region is, and how much an Olympic victory could mean to that battered ego.
He seems too humble to make too much of one Olympic bid. But deep down, he knows what it might mean.
“I feel the pride,” he said. “I’ve always had family and friends behind me, but the city is starting to take notice. I’m a born and raised Buffalonian, and I want people to feel that connection.
“Most people don’t get to do what I do. This gives people a chance to be a part of what I do — to be a part of the Olympic movement.”
gwarner@buffnews.com
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