The United States' USA-1, piloted by Steven Holcomb, front, practices during a training run for the men's four-man bobsled Tuesday.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Old-timers hear about the Night Train and think about James Brown-style cool and casual, calling out stops from Miami to Atlanta to Richmond to Philly and New York — no rush, no fuss.

But for Steven Holcomb, Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler and Curt Tomasevicz, Night Train means sliding down the track with urgency, not cool, powered by Guns ‘n’ Roses-style fury: “Loaded like a freight train/Flyin’ like an aeroplane/Feelin’ like a space brain.”

They’ve got four runs ahead of them — two today and two Saturday at the Whistler sliding track — and the USA 1 bobsled team and its namesake sled arrive with attitude and ambition.

“I will be happy with any medal,” said Olsen, 22, a former high school quarterback from San Antonio who is one of three push athletes in driver Holcomb’s defending world championship sled. “But I will be disappointed if it’s not gold.

“I know what we’re capable of. As a competitor, you have to say that you’re happy with anything that happens. But behind the scenes, we’re here to win, and that is our goal.”

The United States has not won the four-man bobsled gold medal since 1948. The Night Train, however, enters the Olympics as the top-ranked team in the world, worthy competitors for German wizard Andre Lange, who swept both gold medals in 2006 and won the two-man gold at Whistler last Sunday.

Holcomb finished sixth four years ago in Turin but faced involuntary retirement from the sport two years ago because of a degenerative eye disease. Two procedures, one of which involved implanting a contact lens behind his iris, restored his vision and allowed him to keep competing.

The Night Train crew came together in the 2008-2009 season, when the sled became the first American crew to win a four-man world title since 1959.

“Curt (Tomasevicz) is the father,” Olsen said in an interview before the team departed for Vancouver. “I’m the goofball, the wild child. Mesler would be the dictator, the iron fist, and Holcomb . . . he just does what he does. He’s kind of like the CEO.

“It’s an odd chemistry. He doesn’t run the team and say, ‘I want you to do this and that.’ It’s more about trying to take care of the sled, clean it, sand our runners, polish them up, make sure they’re fast, and the less he has to worry about, the better. If all he has to worry about is driving, we’re OK.”

Olsen, like Hays, got into bobsledding after auditioning at a USA Bobsled recruiting camp in San Antonio in 2007. He played quarterback and tight end at O’Connor High School and spent a year at the Air Force Academy before he left Colorado and returned to Texas.

“My mom knew I was depressed because I wasn’t competing,” he said recently. “She knew I wanted to do something, and (bobsled) was the first thing she had heard about that she thought I might try. She said it could turn into something, and it’s turned into a big something.

The last element of the team — the Night Train sled itself — arrived almost by accident.

“Bob Cuneo, our sled engineer, said it was meant to be used for testing and training, but we took it for a run and liked it a lot,” Holcomb said. “We basically begged him to let us use it. He said it wasn’t meant to be used and was painted with black primer paint, but we begged and begged and he said OK.

“When he sent it back to us, they didn’t have time to paint it, so we decided to have it be flat black, like a Harley Davidson. So (Cuneo) came up with the name and the (logo) design like a bobsled on rails, and that’s how we got the Night Train.”

Olsen said Holcomb became obsessed with the Guns ‘n’ Roses version of the song.

“He had it on his phone and would play it for hours,” Olsen said. “I walked in on him once and he was playing, and then came back a few hours later and he still I had it on.

“I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘Getting ready for the season, man, getting ready for the season.’”