WSU MBA alum Chris Stokes reflects on an unlikely Olympic journey

When Chris Stokes landed at the Calgary airport in Canada on a February afternoon in 1988, the Washington State University graduate student had a simple plan: watch his older brother, Dudley, compete for the newly formed Jamaican bobsled team at the Winter Olympics. He had no idea that by the end of the week, he would be racing alongside him.

A former University of Idaho track star who had remained on the Palouse to earn his MBA at WSU, Stokes was a sprinter - not a winter athlete, and certainly not a bobsledder. But when an injury sidelined a member of Jamaica's four-man sled, he was asked to fill in, setting the stage for one of the most improbable Olympic debuts of the modern era.

The 1988 Jamaican bobsled team didn't come close to the podium, famously crashing and disqualifying themselves on the third run of the four-man event. Yet the audacity of their journey - from a tropical island with no ice to the world's most elite winter stage - captured imaginations worldwide and later inspired Cool Runnings, the 1993 film that cemented the team's unlikely place in popular culture.

Nearly four decades later, Stokes says the cheers he heard after the crash still resonate. "I remember walking up the track and hearing people applaud," he said. "We had just crashed. I couldn't understand why they were cheering." It took time to grasp the meaning. "They weren't cheering because they thought we were great athletes," he said. "They were cheering because we tried."

Only later did Stokes grasp what the crowd had seen: not failure, but the courage to step into a world where he was never expected to belong. That idea would come to define his Olympic experience, carrying him through three more Winter Games and eventually into his current role as president of the Jamaican Bobsled Federation.

Stokes grew up in Jamaica as an elite sprinter, winning the national high school championship in the 100 meters. Scholarships followed - until an injury erased them. Determined to keep his son's athletic dreams alive, his father arranged for Stokes to attend Bronx Community College, where he lived with an aunt and continued running. Two years later, healthy again, Stokes had options, including the College of William & Mary.

Then came a phone call from a friend.

"Come hang out with us," the friend said - at the University of Idaho.

"Originally, I thought he said Iowa. I knew where Ohio was but hadn't really heard of Idaho," Stokes recalled with a laugh. Barely 20, he took a risk, gave up the William & Mary opportunity, and boarded a plane for the Palouse, landing amid snow piled "up to the windows."

Under longtime coach Tim Keller, Stokes ran for Idaho for three years, earning a bachelor's degree in finance and forging friendships that blurred the rivalry between Moscow and Pullman. "Even today," he said, "our group still includes people who went to WSU and Idaho. That's how close we were."

After graduation, his father asked what came next. Stokes wanted to keep running, which meant staying in the U.S. Graduate school became the path forward. An advisor at Idaho encouraged him to look next door, and Stokes decided to make the seven-miledrive to Pullman to become a Cougar.

He said WSU's finance-focused MBA program offered rigor without pretense, combining demanding coursework with close faculty mentorship. "I walked into classes where the textbook was written by the professor," he said. "It was a different level."

That first semester ended just as Stokes received the call to come watch his brother compete in Calgary.

What followed remains one of the great Olympic improbabilities. At the time, Stokes was training for the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, running indoors and in peak condition. He arrived to watch Dudley compete in the two-man bobsled, then attended a four-man training session. Someone asked if he wanted to push the sled after a team member's injury. He did. Coaches noticed. By Monday, he was observing. By Wednesday, he was pushing. By Saturday, he was racing in the Olympics.

"It wouldn't be possible today," he said. "But that's what happened."

The crash devastated him. Jamaica, after all, was accustomed to medals. "I felt like we had let the country down," he said. Only later did he understand what the moment represented. "Jamaican bobsled isn't about medals," he said. "It's about that personal struggle - trying something difficult in a place where you're told you don't belong."

Jamaican bobsled isn't about medals. It's about that personal struggle - trying something difficult in a place where you're told you don't belong.

When Cool Runnings arrived in theaters five years later, Stokes watched it in a small cinema in Moscow, Idaho, staying until the very end - long after the popcorn had been swept up - just to see his name scroll past in the credits. "I understood immediately that it was a comedy, not a documentary," he said. "But it told the story honestly. It was funny without being cruel, inspirational without pretending everything was easy. If someone watches that movie and feels braver about trying something they're not supposed to be good at, then it did its job."

After the Olympics - and a hurricane that delayed his return - Stokes faced another test: finishing his MBA. Short on money, he considered leaving school. That's when his mentor, finance professor Hal Kerr, stepped in, arranging a research assistantship so he could finish.

At his oral exam, Stokes wore a suit he planned to return. He forgot to remove the tag. Kerr noticed.

"He put his arm around me and said, 'Chris, you're going to land on your feet,'" Stokes said. "To this day, I still tear up thinking about it."

WSU, he said, taught him more than finance. It taught him how to think, present, and lead. His first formal presentation happened there. He learned golf. He learned canoeing. And he learned that the Palouse, for all its remoteness, was unusually rich in decency. "People there are kind," he said. "That's not true everywhere."

Stokes went on to compete in three more Winter Olympics, finishing as high as 14th overall, and eventually became president of the Jamaican Bobsled Federation. Today, he believes the 2026 team may be the strongest Jamaica has ever fielded, with multiple gold medals in recent international qualification events. "The results speak for themselves," he said.

Asked what he would tell his younger self - the MBA student juggling coursework and Olympic dreams - Stokes didn't hesitate. "The same thing Dr. Kerr told me," he said. "You're going to land on your feet."