Fairy tales can come true at the Olympics, as the United States of America discovered with a surprising victory in women's bobsled and a storybook ending to Brian Shimer's career in the four-man competition.

For nearly five decades the USA was an "also ran" on the world's bobsled tracks. But at the 2002 Salt Lake Games the Americans arrived in style with gold, silver and bronze medals.

Germany, long a sliding superpower, had high expectations it would dominate not just the men's but also the women's races during the XIX Olympic Winter Games.

While Christoph Langen did win the two-man competition on February 17, and teammate Andre Lange the four-man event on February 23, the Americans upset the favored Germans in the women's race February 19 while grabbing silver and bronze in the men's four-man race.

The women -- Germans, Americans, Swiss and those from the 12 other teams that entered sleds -- made history simply by stepping on the track, as they were making their Olympic debut.

For the Americans, it was a controversial debut as throngs of media seemed more enamored with the latest news surrounding Jean Racine than the strong German team of Susi Erdmann and Sandra Prokoff.

Once upon a time Racine was the sport's golden girl -- she reeled off 23 straight victories and claimed the overall World Cup titles in both 1999-2000 and 2000-01. But Racine and long-time brakeman Jen Davidson couldn't find their winning ways this winter. Racine thought she found the solution when she replaced Davidson with track-and-field heptathlete and weight-lifter Gea Johnson in December. But the move backfired as Johnson pulled her left hamstring three days before the race and limped through their starts during the race.

The focus on the Racine-Davidson-Johnson soap opera gave USA 2's Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers peace and quiet and time to focus on their race preparation. It paid off as Bakken and Flowers, despite starting 10th in the 15-sled field, surged to the front of pack with a track-record 48.81-second first run and held off Prokoff and Erdmann on the second to win gold and break the USA's 46-year-old Olympic medal drought in the sport.

"It's such an amazing feeling, I can't explain it," said Bakken, a founding member of the U.S. women's bobsleigh team that dates to 1994. "It's been eight years of hard work, and it's come down to this, the gold medal."

Although bronze-medalist Erdmann and silver-medalist Prokoff finished one-two on the 2001-02 World Cup tour and were strong favorites in the race, both were gracious in applauding the Americans' victory. "I'm very happy to come third," said Erdmann. "Our goal was to stay in the top three, and we made it. I'm very happy."

The men's two-man race was an Olympic classic, a two-sled duel that presented race fans with the possibility that for the second Olympic Winter Games in a row the two-man gold would be split between two men. After three runs down the 1,316-meter Bear Hollow track Germany's Langen and Switzerland's Christian Reich were dead-even.

But Langen's driving skills were on display in the fourth and final run, as the German overcame a slow start and swiftly negotiated the 15-curve track to win the gold medal by nine-hundredths of a second. While Reich took silver, the bronze medal went to Switzerland's Martin Annen.

Langen, whose Olympic medal haul through three Games grew to two golds and two bronze with the two-man win, couldn't add to his Olympic collection in the four-man competition. A partially-torn plantar fascia in his left foot forced him to withdraw after the second run Friday.

Teammate Lange saw that the gold medal still went to Germany, while the USA's Todd Hays, who fell victim to nerves in the two-man race, won silver and Shimer, in the last race of his five-Olympic career, finally won an Olympic medal with the bronze.

Hays's silver medal had to be bittersweet, as he won it without brakeman Pavle Jovanovic, one of his strongest pushers who was handed a two-year drug suspension on the eve of the Games. Thrust unexpectedly into HAYS' four-man sled was Billy Schuffenhauer, a world-class decathlete who entered the Games as an alternate and left with a silver medal.

--Kurt Repanshek