Olympic gold medal-winning bobsledder

Born: April 14, 1980;

Died: May 6, 2017

STEVEN Holcomb, who has died aged 37, was an Olympic gold medal-winning bobsledder who piloted the US four-man bobsled to gold at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. It was the first American gold medal in the event since 1948.

At the Sochi Games in 2014 he won bronze medals in the four-man and two-man bobsled.

His achievements came despite the fact he suffered from a serious eye disease, keratoconus, leaving him with streaked and blurred vision.

Holcomb, who learned to drive a bobsled by feel rather than sight, was nearly forced to retire from the sport a year before his Vancouver success, with his condition meaning he was considered legally blind.

He revealed in his autobiography But Now I See: My Journey From Blindness to Olympic Gold how he struggled to come to terms with the condition and its effects, attempting suicide in 2007.

"After going through all that and still being here, I realised what my purpose was," he said in 2014.

The depression, he believed, largely stemmed from his fight with keratoconus. Holcomb's vision degenerated to the point where he was convinced that his bobsled career was ending and his mood quickly darkened as well.

His eyesight was saved in an operation that turned his 20-500 vision into something close to perfect and his bobsled career took off from there. He returned to competition and won the first of his five world titles at the 2009 World Championships in Lake Placid.

Born in Park City, Utah, Holcomb learned to ski by the time he was two; he became involved in alpine ski racing and attended the Park City Winter Sports High School. He made the US national bobsled team when he was18. From 1999 until 2006 he served in the Utah Army National Guard.

The United States Olympic Committee said in a statement that the American was found dead in his room at the US Olympic Training Centre in Lake Placid, New York, on Sunday morning. The USA Bobsled and Skeleton Federation said it was believed he had died in his sleep. He had been expected to be part of the 2018 US Olympic team at the Pyeongchang Games.

"The only reason why the USA is in any conversation in the sport of bobsled is because of Steve Holcomb," said US bobsled pilot Nick Cunningham, who had a room next to Holcomb in Lake Placid.

"He was the face of our team. He was the face of our sport. We all emulated him. Every driver in the world watched him, because he was that good at what he did."

Holcomb was almost always happy in public, with a sense of humour well-known throughout the close-knit bobsled world.

Team-mates even spent a season chronicling his "Holcy Dance", a little less-than-rhythmic shuffle that he would do at each stop on the World Cup circuit to make fellow sliders laugh.