In a flash
It snowed hard and the wind blew strong and cold in Lake Placid on the afternoon of Jan. 22, 2004.
Looking down the icy bobsled run atop Mount Van Hoevenberg, world-class skeleton racer Courtney Yamada clutched her 75-pound sled, a piece of metal on knifelike blades. She heard a verbal signal that the track was clear. She trained her eye on the traffic light. When it turned from red to green she had 30 seconds to slide onto the track and speed facefirst downhill like a flash.
A half-hour earlier, David Desrocher had arrived for work on the mountain. He was three months into the job as a laborer for the Olympic Regional Development Authority, which runs the bobsled facility at Van Hoevenberg and other alpine and Nordic venues owned by the state. His normal job was to drive sleds from the bottom to the top of the bobrun. But he had come in early because the America’s Cup training was underway and he could get extra hours. His boss assigned him to join the crew that cleared the track of snow in between runs.
He didn’t like that. Today, ORDA says it requires training for on-track workers and employs strict track announcement protocols. On this day, though, Desrocher said, he had never performed his task before and hadn’t received any training.
He walked to mid-track,
