Best Bobsledder

Meg Henderson

Comments (0) Thursday, Sep 21 2000

Six months of the year Meg Henderson is a med student at Baylor College of Medicine. The other six months she lives in Park City, Utah, training for the 2002 Olympics with the national bobsledding team. Meg's sister, Kate, calls her the Dot Richardson of bobsled (Dot took a year off her surgery residency to play softball in the '96 Olympics). Meg was a heptathlete who ran track at the University of Virginia. Working at the '96 Olympic games in Atlanta, she auditioned and made it into one of 11 spots on the bobsledding team. She spent the last two years as a brakeman (the person who sits in back of the two-person sled), but she just switched to being a driver this past year. "It's conquering my fear," she says. "I was scared of driving".There's a lot of consequences. If you mess up, you can cause thousands of dollars of damage " and you can get concussions and break people's backs. It's a lot on your shoulders." Sledding is harder than it looks; it's a rough ride. "It's not as smooth as a roller coaster," she says. "It's like you're in a train wreck the whole way." But the worst part for this Houstonian? She hates being cold.