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By dropping her partner, bobsled star Jean Racine let the Olympic spirit slide

Racine (left) and Davidson: Close didn't count. Ezra Shaw/Allsport

By Kostya Kennedy

There are two kinds of people in Salt Lake City: those who are going to root for U.S. bobsledder Jean Racine today, and those who aren't. Put me in the group that hopes she finishes dead last.

Racine, as you may know, is the delightful young woman who two months ago ditched her best friend and bobsled partner, Jen Davidson, to better her chances for an Olympic medal. Racine did the breakup the new-fashioned way: She left a phone message.

Racine is a driver and Davidson a brakeman, and drivers switch brakemen routinely. This, though, was no ordinary relationship. Jen and Jean -- as they were so sweetly packaged for the media -- had been competing together since they met at Lake Placid in 1996. They were passionate sledders, and their on-track successes and off-track visibility helped lead the IOC to grant women's bobsled Olympic status in '99. To celebrate, Racine and Davidson bought matching gold bands and had them engraved with the words we did it.

Together they won the World Cup in 2000 and 2001 and emerged as the inseparable darlings of their sport. Then, Davidson faltered. The brakeman is primarily responsible for pushing the sled off the start line, and when a poor start caused the pair to finish 11th in a World Cup race last November, Racine became concerned. A month later she dropped Davidson for pusher Gea Johnson, a recent convert to bobsledding with a previous career as a heptathlete that included the 1990 NCAA championship and a four-year ban by the IAAF, track and field's international governing body, for a positive steroid test.

"I thought I could just bring my best friend to the Games. We wouldn't win, but I could do it," said Racine explaining her decision. "But that wouldn't be right. I wasn't going to let anything stop me from trying to win a medal."

Racine is mistaking the Olympics for what they are, not what they should be. I would like to think that there's some vestige of purity in the Games, that away from dopers and dubious judges and organizers on the take, there are some athletes that hew to a higher ideal. We're complicit in creating Racine, of course, in the way we publicize the medals standings and exhort "our" athletes to go for gold. Yet some of us remember what we learned in kindergarten, that friendship should come before winning.

Racine could be a compelling story today. (The competition begins at 4:30.) She endured great personal loss last May when her mother, Cathy, who was 47, died of scleroderma, a rare connective-tissue disorder. Racine will be sledding today for the red-white-and-blue, and she'll be sledding for her mom. Those in her corner might say that ditching Davidson was simply Racine being true to her discipline and doing what she felt she had to do to be the best bobsledder.

This could have been a Hallmark moment for Racine, and in one respect it still is. Whether she wins a medal at Utah Olympic Park this afternoon or whether she tries her best and fails, my opinion of her won't change. Either way, she is already a loser.