Shea, Jim, Jr.

▪ 2003

      Seventy years after his grandfather, Jack Shea, won two Olympic gold medals in speed skating, American skeleton slider Jim Shea, Jr., added another gold to the family collection when he claimed first place in his event at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. Despite trailing defending world champion Martin Rettl of Austria during most of his final heat, Shea sped down the skeleton track at 126.6 km/hr (78.7 mph) to finish with a time of 1 min 41.96 sec—edging Rettl by a razor-thin 0.05-sec margin. Shea had hoped that his 91-year-old grandfather would attend the Games, but only days before the opening ceremonies, Jack Shea died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident. (See Obituaries (Shea, Jack ).) One of the most memorable moments of the Games came when, immediately after his gold-medal-winning performance, Jim, Jr., revealed that he had carried his grandfather's funeral card inside his helmet; he then brandished it for the cameras as fans around him erupted into chants of “U-S-Shea! U-S-Shea!”

      Shea was born on June 10, 1968, in Hartford, Conn. His grandfather had become the first double gold medalist in the Winter Olympics when he won the 500- and 1,500-m speed-skating races at the 1932 Games in Lake Placid, N.Y. His father, Jim, Sr., was also an Olympic athlete, having competed in Nordic combined and cross-country skiing at the 1964 Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria. In 1988 Shea moved with his family to Lake Placid, where he soon began to participate in sliding sports. He tried bobsledding and lugeing but eventually became fascinated with skeleton sledding, in which competitors ride a low-lying sled in a headfirst, prone position. By 1995 Shea had joined the U.S. national skeleton team.

      Determined to rise to the top in his sport, Shea spent two months hitchhiking across Europe to compete in World Cup events. In 1998 he became the first American to win a World Cup race, and the following year he became the first American to win a world skeleton championship. Back on his home track in Lake Placid in 2000, he won the gold medal in skeleton at the inaugural Winter Goodwill Games. When Shea qualified for the Salt Lake City Games, it marked the first time that an American family had produced three generations of Winter Olympians.

      Skeleton sledding had returned as an Olympic event in 2002 after a 54-year hiatus, thanks in part to international lobbying by Shea on the sport's behalf. After winning the gold, Shea said, “My grandpa was with me the whole way. I think he had some unfinished business before he went up to heaven. I think now he can go.”

Sherman Hollar

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