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Evans, 33, will be an alternate at these Games, which arrive eight years after she made her Olympic debut with a bronze medal in Sochi, Russia. That came two years after her first ride, a trip that remains vivid even now.
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A track star from Chicago’s South Side, Evans was a determined athlete who came from a family full of them. But as she barreled down a track in Lake Placid, N.Y., she quickly realized that having bobsled explained to her paled in comparison to experiencing it. Her pounding heart, she remembers, felt as if it had relocated to somewhere between her chin and her cheeks.
Still, Evans gamely pushed the sled and then hopped in behind her pilot. For the next minute or so, she felt every bump and turn, her body whipping back and forth, as she wondered when the ride would — mercifully — end.
“I don’t know how this qualifies as an Olympic sport,” a wobbly-kneed Evans confided to her mother, Sequocoria Mallory, after climbing out of the sled, slipping into the nearest restroom and calling home. “I don’t know why anybody would sign up for this. I felt like I just got kicked down a hill in a trash can.”
Evans’s family has dabbled at the highest level of nearly every sport. She was a record-setting shot-putter at the University of Illinois. Her father, Fred, became the first Black national collegiate swimming champion at Chicago State in the 1970s. Her brother, also named Fred, played in the N.F.L. Her uncle, Gary Matthews, spent years patrolling Major League Baseball outfields, as did her cousin, Gary Matthews Jr.
But when it came to bobsled, Evans knew only of “Cool Runnings,” the 1993 Disney movie loosely based on the story of Jamaica’s 1988 Olympic team, when her track coach, Mike Erb, suggested she try the sport during her senior year of college.
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