How Tennessee Vols fan, bodybuilder went from Knoxville to US Olympic bobsled team

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea — Hakeem Abdul-Saboor used to run a 4.3. Now he runs a 3.46.

Of course, bobsledders test themselves in the 30-yard dash, not the 40-yard dash. Still, the former Knoxville trainer and college football player is tied with U.S. teammate Sam McGuffie — formerly a Michigan running back and NFL player — for fastest 30 on the team. And he believes if he ran the 40, he could go under 4.3. That’s why he is in South Korea, realizing a dream many told him he should abandon, because of speed and power and persistence.

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Three years ago Abdul-Saboor was a bodybuilder in Knoxville with a promising job at Performance Training Inc., working with the Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team and coach Holly Warlick on ACL-tear prevention among many other things. Then he was discovered by an ETSU professor. He started an improbable Olympic chase. And now he’s 30, essentially broke, and loving it.

“It’s weird, you have to rely basically on sponsors to do this sport,” Abdul-Saboor said after a training session Wednesday for the four-man bobsled competition that begins Saturday. “I have clothing sponsors but no money sponsors or supplements at all. My money sponsors are friends and family. But I’m going to continue to do the sport. I’m hoping to find company that will want to sponsor my journey, help me be able to enjoy this time while I’m out here competing and trying to inspire kids, letting them know you can reach your goals and represent the USA.”

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The 6-foot, 230-pound Abdul-Saboor was 25 pounds lighter when considering track and football offers out of Powhatan (Va.) High, near Richmond. He opted for the Division II University of Virginia at Wise and played running back.

Abdul-Saboor tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee as a sophomore. He tore his left ACL four games into his senior season, ending his football career.

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But he remained a high-performing athlete and got into competitive bodybuilding and personal training. That led him to Knoxville and Performance Training Inc., a company started in 1995 by Jackie Ansley, former basketball coach at Knoxville Central and Sevier County high schools. Her superstar list of clients includes Candace Parker, Lisa Leslie, Chamique Holdsclaw, Sue Bird and the UT football team.

Abdul-Saboor worked with a few football players in his three years and worked extensively with the Lady Vols, getting wrapped up in orange along the way.

"I still miss UT football,” he said. “I became a UT fan, all my clients I used to train and just Knoxville in general is just UT all the way. You can’t help but become a Vols fan.”

How Abdul-Saboor was discovered in Knoxville

In 2015, Brad DeWeese found him. DeWeese is an assistant professor in East Tennessee State University’s department of exercise and sport science on Johnson City. He’s also a bobsledding expert — he previously was head sports physiologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Winter Division in Lake Placid, N.Y. The list of bobsledders he has helped develop includes Steve Holcomb, Lolo Jones and Johnny Quinn.

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When an ETSU student named Jordan Kestner showed DeWeese footage of Abdul-Saboor jumping and touching his head on a 10-foot ceiling — Kestner saw it on Facebook — DeWeese knew he was looking at a bobsledder.

“Some of my co-workers were trying to touch their hand to the ceiling, and they were like ‘Your head is going higher than our hands are.’ So they videotaped me,” Abdul-Saboor said. “I didn’t think anything of it, just going through my daily life. And then Brad sent me an email.”

DeWeese invited him to come to ETSU to go through a personal bobsledding “combine,” performing the tests that measure one’s fitness for the sport.

“The bobsled combine consists of a standing broad jump, an underhand shot-put toss, and a series of sprints that allows us to not only determine an athlete's ability to accelerate but their top speed,” DeWeese wrote in an email, and those tests were jarring for Abdul-Saboor — he got sick in the middle of them.

He also scored extremely high on them.

"Physically speaking, Hakeem has the perfect blend of size, strength, and speed — without a doubt, he is one of the most swift-footed athletes we have seen for someone who weighs 230-235 pounds,” DeWeese said.

“Brad was like, ‘Look, you’re meant for bobsled. You need to focus all your attention on it,’ ” Abdul-Saboor recalled. “So I quit my job and started training.”

He went to a rookie camp in Lake Placid for others who had scored well and beat them all in the “push competition.” Then he went to a camp with the veterans, Team USA’s top bobsledders, and won the same competition there. Suddenly, he was on the team. And lacking funds.

“I kind of was in limbo of, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to live,’ but I just needed to focus on training,” he said. “I went to Atlanta, Powhatan, ETSU, wherever I could stay, because without a job I couldn’t pay any rent. Friends and family, that’s who I would crash with. They thought I was crazy. I was like, ‘Look, I have the possibility of going to the Olympics. This coach, he has faith that I have what it takes to make it.’ So it was crashing on a lot of couches.”

And setting up a GoFundMe account, which didn’t reach the goal of $5,000 until shortly after Team USA arrived in South Korea. World Cup touring is all-expenses paid by Team USA, but bobsledders must pay their own way on the North American tour. Through all that, Abdul-Saboor has progressed and was in Nick Cunningham’s two-man sled that finished 21st earlier in the week. He’s also in Cunningham’s four-man sled.

“Big, strong and fast is what we’re looking for,” Cunningham said of push athletes. “And can do the sport. There’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes the sport entails, like being your own pit crew and working with the engineer, sitting in sleds and trying to find every hundredth of a second. You have to buy into the process. Hakeem has done a good job with all that.”

And like Cunningham and many others, he got there fast, with the help of DeWeese.

“Brad has been very important,” Abdul-Saboor said. “He knows his stuff, they do a lot of data at ETSU. It’s just a very nice place to work out, and they have science behind everything. I don’t like it when people tell me, ‘Do this just because.’ I want to know why I’m doing this. I really bought into this sport because of him.”