That cult favorite of the Winter Olympics is showing up in Morgan Freeman-voiced Visa commercials during the Vancouver Games, but the tropical sledders are nowhere to be found. The team first competed as a curiosity at the 1988 Calgary Games, crashed their sled and walked it through the finish line as a crowd favorite. The team finished poorly at the 1992 Albertville Games, but came in a respectable 14th at the 1994 Lillehammer Games. However, at the 2006 Turin Games and again this year the team failed to qualify.

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“The team had spent the last few weeks hoping for a spot. Hannukkah Wallace, the team’s driver, is ranked among the top 50 drivers, and the squad benefited from sleds donated by the American bobsledder Todd Hays. But a preliminary list of qualifiers did not include the team, according to The Associated Press.

‘I’m in tears, man,’ said Devon Harris, a member of the original national team in 1988, in a telephone interview. ‘It’s one of those things. It’s highly disappointing. Our team worked very hard and fell short.’

Harris said the team was vying for a wild-card slot and finished two sleds short of making the Olympics. The team’s attention, he said, has already turned to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

‘We intend to come back and come back huge,’ Harris said.”

However, there IS a Jamaican-born bobsledder — now a Calgary resident — competing for Canada on Sunday. More on Lascelles Brown — a silver medalist four years ago — at the Toronto Sun.

(Photo by Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images)