Bobsledders Yorgo Alexandrou (left) and Dan Janjigian prepare for another push.




Photograph by Paul Myers

Sled Heads

For the Armenian bobsled team, the journey to attend the Olympic Games has been a wild and interesting run

By Oakley Brooks

Bobsledders say a lot is in the push. An extra instant spent in those first few moments of the race snowballs, by a factor of three or four, by the time the sledders reach the finish line.

So every movement in the push is magnified: the brakeman's initial shove, the treacherous hustle down the ice on spiked shoes, the driver's dive for the exact center of the sled, and the braker's final entry at the back of the sled, trying not to pull back on the 450-pound machine.

Dan Janjigian knows the push. For the last several years, while competing on the world two-man bobsled circuit, his training diet has consisted mainly of pushing his sled-on-wheels down his street in San Jose. And since he and brakeman Yorgo Alexandrou qualified two months ago for the upcoming Olympics, they've been running the suddenly novel sled down Welsh Avenue for everyone from Peter Jenning's camera crew to the local cub reporter.

But Janjigian knows the other push, too. That's the one that drove this tech-jock to sled-driving school in Calgary four years ago. It's the one that led him to take out another mortgage on his house to chase speed and a chance to stand among the world's best. The push that, improbably, has led him to Salt Lake City to compete Feb. 16-17 under the Armenian flag of his roots.

"He always said 'I'm in it to win; I'm not here to waste time,' and we said 'Well ...'" Florence Janjigian said of her son, rolling her eyes and sneaking a grin. "He was just going to do what he wanted to do."

You've undoubtedly seen or heard of Janjigian, 29, and Alexandrou, also 29, by now. They are, according to newsman Jennings, the "feel-good story" of the Olympics. In addition to Los Angeles and New York, papers in such bobsledding hotbeds as Bend, Ore., and Memphis, Tenn., have picked up the story.

"Someone said we were the most covered Olympic athletes, period," Janjigian said.

Small countries' bobsled teams always seem to make good copy in Olympic years--especially when a team has a sled on Rollerblade wheels.

Janjigian and Alexandrou were also hoping to spin a little of their sudden success into gold. The two bobsledders dug themselves into a bit of a financial hole over the last year trying to qualify for the Games. The hole only deepened when they did earn a spot at Salt Lake City in early December, incurring another wave of travel and training costs. They were looking to catch the eyes of corporate sponsors or members of the wider Armenian-American community to pitch into the cause.

Just before the two left for their last round of pre-Olympic training in Calgary in mid-January, the heavy press had only drawn a lukewarm response. Janjigian said he'd raised around $30,000 of the $200,000 he needed.

"It's going horridly, but it's never been about the cash," Janjigian said, unfazed.

They did pack 50 people into Dan's father's restaurant--the Armenian Gourmet in Sunnyvale--for a benefit dinner on Jan. 19. Local Armenians and other South Bay residents at the dinner clamored for autographed postcards with the sledders' picture on it.

Bobsledding on a Budget

The Armenian group's situation--with some of the shoestring markings of a start-up company--is part of small-country bobsledding. In any Olympics, there is the competition for medals among the sport's elite--the Germans, the Italians and the Swiss, and the battle between the rest--the Jamaicans, the Irish and sledders from Monaco. The teams from track-less countries compete fiercely but they also help each other along--swapping expertise and used equipment. The American driver Bruce Rozzeli even leant a hand to the Janjigian and the Armenian contingent several years back, selling them an old sled for $13,000--less than a pair of new skate-like runners would cost today.

"We're all in the same boat," said Peter Kolotouros, the Saratogan who competed on the Greek team in the 1998 Nagano Games on a sled bought from a Canadian driver.

Kolotouros, a former track star at Lynbrook High School, received sponsorship from UPS during the '98 games, a boost that Janjigian could only dream about this winter.

He had local start-up Juniper.com backing him during the 1999 World Cup season, but that company eventually went under. This fall he lined up some potential Silicon Valley sponsors, but as the economy sunk and then Sept. 11 hit, they backed out. He's had to pitch in many of the profits from his own web-design company, WebCage.net, to keep the sled sliding this year.

"We're a long way from the hand-over-fist economy of two years ago," Janjigian said. "I haven't drawn a paycheck for a long time."

Walking into Janjigian's west San Jose house in mid-December, it wasn't clear that flush times had disappeared altogether.

A Porsche Boxster sat in the driveway, near his Yamaha cruiser. Inside, above two high-powered desktops and a tangle of power cords and accessories, one of Michael Jordan's jerseys hung framed on the wall.

Janjigian had recently acquired one of Microsoft's X-Box video game systems, and after a morning push session and an afternoon workout, he and Alexandrou plopped onto the couch in front of the big-screen TV to unwind with a game of Halo. They alternately zapped freakish android creatures with photon guns and nibbled on energy bars gifted by a friend at a local GNC outlet.

Dressed in neat sets of sweats and cleanly shaven, the two could have pulled off a quick TV spot if the need arose. Instead they yelped at the screen as a player fell dead from fire by an unseen enemy behind a digital tree.

Janjigian passed the game controller to Alexandrou and considered for a moment what his Olympic appearance might mean to the Armenian community.


Photograph by Paul Myers

The Armenian bobsled team, Vorgo Alexandrou (left) practice their push outside the San Jose home of Dan Janjigian (right).




Team Armenia

"I don't know if people pick up on the Armenian part of this," he said.

Armenians come from a mountainous area near the Caspian Sea, and their history dates back in the ancient era. Over the last 100 years they have faced oppression from both neighboring Russia and Turkey. A massive genocide in 1915 at the hands of the Young Turks regime created a wave of refugees that included Janjigian's grandparents.

His paternal grandfather was born along a roadside during an escape from Turkey. And Janjigian's maternal grandmother, Nevart Karagozian, left her native land to settle in Fresno. In 1977, she moved in with the Janjigian family in the Santa Clara Valley, giving Dan and his two siblings a link to the Armenia of old. Florence Janjigian said Nevart always had stories and some traditional food brewing at home. Some of her influence rubbed off on Dan--he said he once challenged a teacher at Redwood Middle School on why the Armenian genocide wasn't studied at all.

Throughout their years in Santa Clara and then Saratoga, the Janjigian family stayed in touch with a small Armenian community in the South Bay through St. Andrew's Church in Cupertino and weekly "Armenian school" for children at Argonaut Elementary School in Saratoga.

"Being Armenian was always an integral part of the household," Florence said. Members of a Russian TV crew that interviewed the family members recently quipped that they were "more Armenian than Armenians."

Dan Janjigian said the growth and strength of the Armenian community in the United States may have something to do with the continued exodus of Armenians to places like Glendale and Fresno as their native country remains mired in widespread poverty.

"If you can leave, people think 'Why not?'" he said.

That West Coast community has been enthusiastic about the team's recent success. One lady from Fresno called the team in the sled-preparation shed in Lake Placid just before a crucial qualifying race in December. And an accomplished Armenian artist from Glendale later agreed to paint the team's sled for the Salt Lake City Games.

"The important thing is that Armenia is competing and people are asking questions about the country," Janjigian said. "My grandmother is so fired up. For her, it's not because we're competing in the bobsled but because people are learning about Armenians."

Searching for Speed

A water polo player and a wrestler at Saratoga High School, Janjigian was a hard-driving free spirit. He damaged his knee wrestling, cutting his grappling days short, and an injured shoulder ended his water polo career--one that he said might have continued at the college level.

During several summers in high school, he sold educational books over the phone for a company based in Nashville, Tenn. "That's where he got his savvy," Florence Janjigian said. One of his license plates still reads shorthand for "Bookman Dan."

At his graduation in the spring of 1991, Dan slid across the ceremony platform on his knees to get his diploma and then headed south to study business at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. He made his way back to the Bay Area after graduation, and he worked for several years with Microsoft's WebTV venture.

In 1998, a friend on the Greek bobsled team talked up the rush of the sport enough to convince Janjigian to go to driving school in Calgary--"I love feeling speed." He got more than speed--driving, said Janjigian, was like going "90 mph through a construction zone, with pylons tight on either side of you."

He enlisted former football player and fellow Armenian-American Ara Bezdjian as his brakeman. For the next several winter seasons, the two traveled to American and European circuit races and then earned enough points to enter World Cup races.

The team suffered a major setback last winter, when Bezdjian's back--injured lifting weights--could no longer take the 4 to 5 Gs of force that typically push on sledders during big turns on the track.

That led Janjigian to Alexandrou, a friend from San Jose who ran a jet-ski rental business and had some time last winter to join Janjigian for a World Cup race in February 2001.

Alexandrou had just one day on the ice to prepare for what was a traumatizing first race.

"I almost didn't get in the sled," he said. "You're bent over so far you're kissing your own butt. Then the force on the turns sucked the air out of my lungs. If you pick your head up you'll get whiplash."

Alexandrou survived, and when Janjigian's chosen brakeman for this fall's races--an Armenian weightlifter--could not get out of that country after Sept. 11, Janjigian again called on his local buddy for an Olympic push.

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