BEIJING : When the Alpine skiing events start at the Beijing Olympics, Haiti will be presenting their own version of"Cool Runnings" - the film that shot the Jamaican bobsleigh team to fame in the 1990s - but with fresh ambition.
Shortly after an earthquake flattened much of Port-au-Prince and killed more than 200,000 people, Frenchman Thierry Montillet, a cousin of 2002 downhill Olympic champion Carole Montillet, decided to create the Haitian skiing federation. "Haiti stories were about the earthquake, diseases, corruption. We thought, what if we created the Haitian ski federation. And we took the first Haitian, Jean-Pierre Roy, to the world championships in Garmisch Partenkirchen in 2011.""We started from scratch and we got advice from Lamine Gueye . Even if nothing happened like he said it would, it helped us a lot," Montillet said.
"Jean-Pierre was an anecdote, but Richardson, who trains in the French Alps, is more than that. People still think Haiti, there's no skiing. Everybody thinks Cool Runnings, but he finished 35th in the world championships,"said Montillet.The comparison with the Jamaican story might have helped the Haitian skiing team at first but it now does them a disservice."They have a hard time understanding that we are more than that. We're a bit prisoners of that old story.