Audio By Carbonatix
There’s a good chance Errol Kerr has heard all the bobsled jokes before. The mid-90s flick Cool Runnings did wonders for popularity of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled crew, and in a way he’s following in the footsteps of the four-man team.
Kerr, who has a Jamaican father and an American mother, will compete for Jamaica in ski cross at the Vancouver games–the first year the bomb-down-the-hill sport will be an Olympic event.
He’ll be Jamaica’s lone winter Olympian. And here’s the catch: He’s actually pretty good. The 23-year-old finished fifth at the 2008 Winter X Games and tenth at the 2009 World Championships. And he’s getting more popular, according to a recent Chicago Tribune report.
The most popular athlete at the freestyle skiing World Cup last weekend wasn’t X Games gold medalist and four-time Olympian Daron Rahlves. Or Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, the aerialist with the Hurricane, the hardest jump in the sport.
No, the most sought-after autograph belonged to Errol Kerr, the one-man ski-cross team from Jamaica.
“You’re catching this, aren’t you?” asked Kerr as he scrawled his name on the sleeves of $300 ski jackets and smiled for camera-phone portraits. “Such a small island and such a small team and we can compete with the best of them.”
