Some might say he’s Usain Bolt on skis. Not surprisingly, though, when Errol Kerr tells people he’s a member of the Jamaican Winter Olympic team, most pull out the bobsled one-liners.

“When people hear of a Jamaican skier, they expect dreads hanging out the back of my helmet and a smoke stream following me down the mountain,” Kerr said.

This is no joke, though.

Less than two years since Bolt brought world records and world renown to the island nation with his sprinting, Jamaica’s latest winter star is hoping to put his country on the map in the new Olympic sport of skicross.

“It’s more than just a country,” Kerr said. “It’s in my blood, in my DNA.”

Born to an American mother and a Jamaican father, Kerr grew up a dual citizen between Lake Tahoe in California, where he moved with his mother as a child, and Westmoreland, Jamaica’s westernmost parish.

He rolls with the jokes, most of which inevitably draw comparisons to the Jamaica bobsled team, a fan favourite in the 1988 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary that inspired the comedy movie “Cool Runnings”.

In fact, one of Kerr’s sponsors is a beverage company called Cool Runnings.

“There’s no running away from it,” Kerr said of the bobsled team. “I embrace it. They laid the groundwork.”

But while the bobsled team was initially a novelty, Kerr enters the Vancouver Olympics – his first – as a serious contender.

The hybrid style of skicross draws on Kerr’s extensive background in Alpine skiing. It also makes good use of the rougher edge he picked up in motocross and BMX.

“Errol’s got a good shot at the Olympics,” said American Jonny Moseley, an Olympic gold medallist who will be a TV commentator for the freestyle events – moguls, aerials and skicross – in Vancouver. “He’s cut out for the sport.”

Kerr’s background helps in an event that is rowdier than Alpine ski racing, where one athlete races against the clock. In skicross, four competitors speed down a steep, winding course together, taking on banked turns, berms and each other along the way. The first one across the finish line wins.

“It’s very pure, very simple that way,” said Moseley. “But there’s a lot of contact, a lot of strategy and jockeying.”

To viewers, it is dynamic, and anyone who has raced friends down a mountain can relate to the scramble.

Kerr is taking nothing for granted. He spends his days training at Alpine Meadows, a resort at Lake Tahoe that has sponsored him, and in his mother’s front yard, where he built a starting gate with the same specifications as the one in Vancouver and rigged up his own snowmaking machine.

His mother, Catherine Kerr, was once a ski racer herself but his late father never strapped on a pair of skis.

Kerr said part of his dream was always to race for his father’s country – under the black, green and yellow flag of Jamaica.

© AP 2012

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