* What was Sanka's qualification to be an Olympian, again? He's really not much of an athlete. Derice picks him for the team due to his experience as a pushcart driver (dubious to start with), but then he ends up being the brakeman, not the driver.
** What do you mean "qualification"? It's not like he had to beat out a ton of people to make it on Jamaica's team.
** He showed up. That's qualification enough.
** And watching a pushcart race is what gave the real team's coach the idea for a bobsled team in the first place.
* Why would Junior's dad tell him to give up this foolishness and come home ''after'' they had already qualified?
** Because he doesn't care. Remember how he dismissed Junior's protests that "the team needs me"?
** And in the movie version, they were still seen as a joke at the time.
* They're thinking up names for the sled, and Derice suggests "Cool Runnings". Sanka says "So what's it mean?" and Derice explains that it means "Peace Be The Journey". Um....what?? "Cool Runnings" is ''already'' in English. It doesn't need to be translated. The word "cool" refers to how ice is cold and/or how we're a bunch of cool dudes or whatever, and "runnings" refers to how they have to run really fast to make the sled go. Right? I think the idea is that there's a phrase that means "Peace Be The Journey" in some other language, which coincidentally sounds like "cool runnings" in English. So apparently the sled is named after that phrase and the movie is named after the pun. But if that's the case, what other language is Derice speaking? Don't they speak English in Jamaica? And how would you spell the actual name of the sled?
** Jamaica's official language is English, but its national language is Jamaican Patois. I assume that's the language being referenced here, but I wouldn't know how to spell the original "Cool Runnings". It's confusing because this is the only time in the movie they reference the idea that Jamaicans have a separate language.
** You're overthinking it slightly. It was more Irv asking what it means in the same way you might ask a person what a local phrase you don't use in your country means. As an example, you might ask me what 'On cloud nine' means (if you were unfamiliar with it) and I would tell you it means to be extremely happy. It's about the idiom itself, not the language.
* Blitzer's backstory is that he cheated on a previous race; he put weights in the sled to make it go faster. Would that actually ''work''? I'm pretty sure that all objects fall at the same speed regardless of their mass. It might be a bit different on a slope instead of free-fall, but then again you'd still have the problem that a heavier sled would be harder to push in the first place, so you'd have a slower start and presumably a slower time overall.
** Agree. The film makers should have said Blitzer illegally heated his runners - a tactic for which three East German women lugers were disqualified at the real 1968 Winter Olympics - or that he used performance enhancing drugs.