The man is not normal. He could be insane. The man had a stomach ache, a "big pain" he says, for two days. A pain so bad it felt like the devil himself was doing a drum roll in his lower intestine. But the man did not want to miss any training, so he went to the track and tightened his belt to hold back the pain.
WHISTLER, B.C. -- The man is not normal. He could be insane. The man had a stomach ache, a "big pain" he says, for two days. A pain so bad it felt like the devil himself was doing a drum roll in his lower intestine. But the man did not want to miss any training, so he went to the track and tightened his belt to hold back the pain.
Next came a fever, one so bad he sweated through his sheets. Then the man felt a little better. Then he felt much worse. And then he was rushed by helicopter from Whistler to a hospital in Vancouver where he had emergency surgery -- on the opening night of the Olympic Games -- to remove the appendix that burst when he tightened his belt to hold back the pain.
"After surgery I had two days in hell," the man said Tuesday. "My muscles were paralyzed. I couldn't breath. I was [hyperventilating]. That was one terrible day, and the second was the hiccups. But not like five minute hiccups, half an hour. Each time when I drink something, I was like [hiccup, hiccup, hiccup].
"Can you imagine the pain if I do hiccups two days after surgery? That was two days in hell. Now, I don't care about crashes."
It is a good thing that he does not care, since Janis Minins is a bobsled pilot, a possibly insane Latvian who crashed his sled during training on Monday. Which was 10 days after he had emergency surgery to remove his appendix and nine days after doctors told him there was no way he was going to compete at the Olympics.
"Some doctor said I need to sign somewhere, that I take risk in me, but I look healthy," Minins says. "OK, I lost eight kilos, and I tried [Tuesday] to run with the sled. It felt good. You know, after lying in bed for two or three days, you have the feeling that all your muscles are a little bit sleepy, and I need to wake them up fast. [Monday's training] crash wake up my head, so now I hope my muscles will wake up."
The 29-year-old was alert enough, and gifted enough, to pilot his four-man rig to first place at the 2009 World Cup event in Whistler. (That was after he and his team survived on a homemade diet of grilled chicken, wiener schnitzel, boiled potatoes, and cucumber and tomato salad to save money so they could actually afford to be at the event).
Minins' Whistler win tagged him as a contender heading into 2010. That is, until he was airlifted to Vancouver. Surgery cost him a chance to slide in the two-man event, but with Latvia searching for its third Olympic medal, and with Minins now able to stand upright, there was no way he was going to miss out on the four-man race starting Friday.
"He is definitely insane," Steven Holcomb, the pilot of USA-1, said. "You've seen his eyes."
Every bobsledder is slightly brain damaged. Think about what they do: hop in a metal tube. Hurtle down a track at 150 km/h. Even Holcomb, who says he is a "normal guy," is not so normal at all. Until he had surgery to correct a degenerative eye disease, he was essentially sliding blind.
"I guess you could say that was pretty crazy," Holcomb said.
Minins has taken nuts to a new level. It is not his fault. He blames his father, the man who plunked him on a dirt bike when he was five years old.
"I lost my fear," he says. "In the beginning, I thought my crazy father is pushing me all the time to try everything, so I tried a lot sports and one of the craziest sports was dirt bike. I keep trying to drive a little bit, but very careful. Not jump."
He still rides a motorcycle. There was the hush-hush incident that occurred last summer when Minins, also the upstanding member of parliament for the Latvian municipality of Kaldiga, was howling along on his father's Harley Davidson. There was a 90-degree turn. Minins lost control. He did not turn.
"I went straight and flied into a cemetery," he says. "I woke up, [brushed] myself off. It was not fast, just 80 km/h. It was normal, not 150 km/h."
Not like rocketing around the Whistler Sliding Centre in a bobsled, without an appendix, and with a madcap gleam in his eye.
"I think after this, what happened now, I think everybody will say that maybe I am a little bit, not a little bit but a lot crazy," Minins says. "But you know it happens once every four years, the Olympics, and I just feel myself that I can do it, and nobody will [tell] me to stop."
