When Chris Stokes landed at the Calgary airport in Canada on a February afternoon in 1988, the Washington State University graduate student had a simple plan: watch his older brother, Dudley, compete for the newly formed Jamaican bobsled team at the Winter Olympics. He had no idea that by the end of the week, he would be racing alongside him.
A former University of Idaho track star who had remained on the Palouse to earn his MBA at WSU, Stokes was a sprinter — not a winter athlete, and certainly not a bobsledder. But when an injury sidelined a member of Jamaica’s four-man sled, he was asked to fill in, setting the stage for one of the most improbable Olympic debuts of the modern era.