Vancouver Games haunt Kerr has Truckee resident waits for snow to fall
By Roman Stubbs, Reno Gazette-Journal
The homemade plywood start gate sits in his front yard in Truckee, not far from the garage, where several sets of skis are carefully stacked against the back wall.
They were essential pieces of Errol Kerr’s ninth-place finish in skicross at the 2010 Winter Olympics where he competed for Jamaica, but they sit unnoticed in the mid-summer heat.
The real tools of Kerr’s trade are the welder and plasma cutter hanging from cords in the cluttered garage. They help the 24-year-old do what he has been doing all his life — they help him take risks.
His latest project involves attaching steel brackets to a Canon HD camera. The camera soon will be mounted to a remote control helicopter and flown over the New York Jets training camp by Kerr, as part of an aerial photography deal with HBO’s NFL series “Hard Knocks.”
But if he could, Kerr would be somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere right now, searching for the formula that ultimately could lead to gold in 2014.
The truth is, the 2010 Olympics still haunt him.
All the romanticism that came with being Jamaica’s one-man ski team and of continuing the tradition of the bobsled team that inspired the movie “Cool Runnings,” is muted in his mind. He was part of the inaugural skicross competition at the Olympics, and though Kerr smiles with one mention of memories created in Vancouver, the skiing left him feeling like he failed to finish the job.
“Ninth place, nobody remembers who got ninth. By me not winning wasn’t a complete fail, but it wasn’t a complete success,” Kerr said. “If I went and got a gold medal right now, (Jamaica) would be on the map. So I think, you know, by not doing that, it’s a much slower and painstaking process.”