Bremerton's Bree Schaaf finishes fifth in bobsled in another harrowing day | Ron Judd

WHISTLER, B.C. — It was her first Olympics. Her first full season racing against the world's best bobsled racers on the world's scariest tracks. First time in the international spotlight.

Bree Schaaf finished fifth. She beat her personal hero, teammate Shauna Rohbock, by a hundredth of a second. By any measure, a stellar day to cap a stellar year. A lifetime memory.

Yet there stood Schaaf, with wet snow drifting down Blackcomb Mountain, wearing the sort of empty stare people bring home from combat.

Shellshocked.

"I don't know why I'm so emotional," she said.

Yes, she did. Who wouldn't?

She and her sliding partner, Emily Azevedo, had just watched Germany's Cathleen Martini, perhaps the world's best driver, get chewed up and spit out by the Whistler Sliding Centre track. The duo, headed for a medal on their fourth run, entered the track's most-perilous section — curves 11 through 13, right side up and smoking along at 90 mph, and came out upside down and hospital bound.

Their sled careened around a corner and smashed into a wall. The impact flung brakeman Romy Logsch out onto the track, which she proceeded to fly down, spread-eagled, like a rag doll to the bottom corner.

The crowd gasped and went silent. This track had already killed one Olympian this month. It let out a collective sigh when Logsch stood up and waved, to convince the world, and herself, that she was OK.

"It's pretty upsetting," Schaaf said. "Martini's had an incredible season. I couldn't be happier for Canada (which captured first and second) and especially for Erin (Pac, the American who claimed the bronze). But it's tough to watch somebody be taken out of medal position like that."

Schaaf's wild Olympic ride, which began a month ago when she was named to drive the third U.S. Olympics sled, shook her to the core in a way she couldn't have expected.

Sure, she was resilient, eventually sounding upbeat, and already planning to do it all again in the Sochi Games in 2014.

But her entire Olympic experience here, like that of all the other sliders, was tainted by a tragedy made even more painful by what it represents: An overreach by Olympic officials to make the Whistler track the fastest, most dangerous in the world.

Schaaf and other athletes are too polite to say it. But someone should: It is one thing to build a track that challenges the world's best athletes. It is another to build one that the best drivers in the world cannot successfully negotiate on a regular basis.

That, coupled with Canadian officials pigheaded and, in hindsight, insane decision to limit practice time here to foreign athletes, led directly to one death and crashes too numerous to count here in the first 12 days of the 2010 Winter Games.

"It's something that people with 150 runs are simply going to handle a lot better than people coming here with six," Schaaf said. "It feels like survival."

Wednesday night, in what should have been one of the great moments of her life, Schaaf stood third — in medal position — with only two racers to come. She should have been dancing a jig, crossing her fingers, praying for a small mistake to keep her on the third rung.

Not here. Not in Canada. Not at these Olympics. All she could find in her heart to do was pray for the safety of the other drivers.

"These are our friends," she said. "I was just hoping everyone would get down. You don't want to see a race end like that. I don't want to sound like a Mom, but. ...

But someone has to. Three sleds went upside down this night at 90 mph. The fact that all six occupants walked away is a credit to helmet design and good luck.

Male bobsled drivers have fared little better. Three of the four-man crews yet to compete have dropped out during training — one driver, Edwin Van Calker, from the Netherlands, admitting he looked at the track, weighed his degree of experience, and decided it simply wasn't worth the risk.

"Some say it is a brave decision," he said. "Some say (I'm) scared. "For me, it's not about performing, it's about surviving."

Yet his own coach called him a coward.

"I've never had someone get to a major event and not compete because they're scared," said Tom de La Hunty of Great Britain. "You keep your inner fears to yourself and do it. It's that kind of macho sport. You go over the top together."

Beautiful. The gung-ho mindset that created a sliding track with one misplaced curve too many.

At the end of the women's race, with Canada, finally, actually "owning a podium" in an event in which they'd kept the field of play to themselves, "O, Canada" rang out in drunken revelry across the bottom of Blackcomb Mountain.

And in the village below, a memorial to dead luge slider Nodar Kumaritashvili of Georgia remained, candles burning, flowers wilting, Olympic pins from dozens of nations rusting in the rain.

It will be up to the host nation to decide if it was worth it.

Ron Judd: 206-464-8280 or at rjudd@seattletimes.com