No-hopers add flavour to Salt Lake

Winter Olympics: The Winter Olympic flame ignites ambitions in the strangest places. If the Jamaican bobsleigh team in 1988 have come to symbolise triumph against the odds, then there is a list of no less improbable characters here to fulfil the Olympic precept that taking part is more important than winning.

Everyone loves a hopeless loser. It was Kenya's Philip Boit, nephew of Michael Boit, the 1972 Olympic 800 metres bronze medallist, who captured the imagination in Nagano four years ago as he struggled through the 10 km cross-country ski race to finish 97th and last, 20 minutes behind the winner.

Boit is back, claiming to be more competent and, with the 10 km discontinued, moves up to a longer distance. But there will be no shortage of candidates to succeed him for the distinction of finishing last in this discipline.

Prawat Nagvajara, a 43-year-old engineering professor, will become the first athlete from Thailand to compete in the winter games. Born in Bangkok, Nagvajara started skiing for fun when he went to college in Boston, but later competed in local races and began dreaming of the Olympics. All he had to do to qualify was compete in five international races.

Another cross-country skier from a country with no winter games pedigree is Isaac Menyoli of Cameroon. He wants to use what he calls his "15 minutes of fame" to press home to Africans the dangers of Aids .

Menyoli, a sprinter in high school, will be watched by his US-based family and hopes his races will be shown on television in Cameroon. "My friends think it is very stupid; we celebrate the Summer Olympics at home but the Winter Olympics are unheard of," he said.

Then there is Dinah Browne in the luge. Born and raised on St Croix, one of the Virgin Islands, she was in her teens before she saw a snowflake. She did not sit in a luge until she was 29, three years ago when she attended a two-week training camp in Calgary designed to broaden luge's appeal outside Europe.

"I had a vague notion of what the sport was," she said. "Then they gave me a helmet and I was like, 'Oh, you need a helmet?' It was a real natural feeling."

Since the international luge federation began its development camps in 1987 it has trained people from India, China, Brazil and 13 other nations not usually associated with the sport; 15 who first tried the sport in the camp will be here, including a father and son team from Venezuela.

Following in the ice-tracks of the Jamaicans are Yorgo Alexandrou and Dan Janjigian, representing Armenia in the two-man bob having done all their training on a housing estate in San Jose, California.

They break off training for fund-raising exercises, such as the $100-a-plate meal held earlier this week in a church hall. Janjigian, who supports the Armenian bobsled team with proceeds from his web site design company, lost his original brakeman to a back injury. He went home and recruited a 19-year-old weightlifting champion, only for the visa application to be rejected in the wake of the September 11th attacks. So he ended up with Alexandrou, his best friend and an importer of Greek wine.

Not every federation enjoys seeing its sport made fun of, though, in what is usually its only appearance on television in four years. The International Skiing Federation (FIS) has been accused of betraying the Olympic ideal by imposing selection criteria to avoid a repeat of such images from Albertville as the Lebanese skier overtaking the Moroccan in the slalom. And then there was Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards, who took part in the ski jumping at Calgary in 1988.

The most vocal critic of this new policy is Basharal Huneidi, who was blocked from becoming the first athlete to represent Kuwait in the winter games. He began as a desert skier on the dunes, but has since spent five months a year skiing in Europe and competed in 12 FIS races this winter in the hope of acceptance for the giant slalom.

"I'm not saying there should not be any criteria at all," he said. "I'm just saying they should be modified to enable competent sportsmen from small nations to be there."

But a debt of gratitude may be in order to the Moldovan embassy in Berlin who blocked the attempt by a German TV comedian to get citizenship as a way of competing for them in the cross-country skiing. Stefan Raab, who once performed in the Eurovision song contest with a song called Wadde Hadde Dudde Da, is no stranger to publicity stunts. One was to take on a woman boxer. He lost.