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According to blackamericaweb.com, Vonetta Flowers always wanted to go to the Olympics. But she could have never imagined that her triumph would be in a sport she’d barely heard of, much less ever attempted – and in the Winter Games at that.

A Birmingham, Alabama native, Flowers was a decorated track and field athlete who thought she might become the next Jackie Joyner-Kersee until an ankle injury forced her off the track. But her Olympic dreams didn’t end there. She and her husband, Johnny, also a track athlete, saw a flyer one day for bobsled tryouts and decided to do it just for fun. Track athletes have long been recruited for bobsled teams, as their strength and speed help propel the sled down the icy chute.

When her husband pulled a hamstring before the tryouts, Flowers competed instead. At 26 years old, she began competing as a bobsledder, pursuing an Olympic berth in a completely different sport than the one she competed in most of her life.

By 2000, on the eve of the Games, despite her lack of experience, Flowers and her driver ended up winning and finished third in World Cup competition. With the Olympics on the horizon, her driver asked her to compete to remain part of the two-man sled, and Flowers refused. She would eventually partner with Jill Bakken for the 2000 Games. This would be the first year that women’s bobsledding was even an official Olympic sport, so stakes were high.

The Bakken/Flowers team were total underdogs, and though Flowers made it to the Games, she had neither an agent nor sponsorships and was competing in an expensive sport on a limited budget. Her husband supported her all the way, putting hundreds of thousands of miles on their car to support his wife’s efforts.

Flowers, an avowed Christian, had an array of positive forces on her side. The other team, comprised of Jean Racine and Gea Thompson, were top-ranked, but had internal problems. In fact, Racine asked flowers to team with her after Johnson suffered an injury but Flowers stayed loyal to her teammate.

She and Bakken would win gold for the U.S. on U.S. soil in Salt Lake City, becoming the first two women to win gold in the new Olympic sport and the first U.S. team to earn a bobsled medal in the last 46 years. Flowers made history as the first black Winter Games athlete to win a gold medal.

“This was a leap of faith,” Flowers told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “The way I see it, God put me in this sport for a reason. All those years in track and field paid off. God had a plan for me in bobsled.”

Flowers retired from bobsled after competing in the 2006 Olympic Games. She still lives in Alabama with her husband and twin sons, Jaden Michael and Jordan Maddox.