The U.S. Olympic team was surprising  not just because of the large number of medals, but also because of the diverse ethnic makeup of the team.

The Winter Olympic Games have long been a showcase for athletes from Northern climates and, not surprisingly, have featured predominantly white competitors.

Until recently, any conversation about the participation of people of color in the Winter Olympics would invariably end up with a joke about the Jamaican bobsled team, which first participated in the Olympics in 1988. After all, what could be sillier than the idea of a bunch of brown-skinned folks from a tropical island participating in the snowy Winter Games?

But it’s no joke that medal winners from this year’s U.S. Olympic team included the first African-American  man or woman  to win a gold medal, a Cuban American, a working-class Mexican American and seven other members of minority communities. In fact, 11 of America’s medals were won by minority athletes.

Each of this new crop of American champions has taken a unique road to Olympic success.

Vonetta Flowers of Helena, Ala., a former All-American track star, became the first African American to win Winter Olympic gold as a member of the two-woman bobsled team. Flowers answered an ad at the 2000 Olympic track and field trials in Sacramento, Calif., looking for someone with explosive speed to help give the U.S. bobsled team a good push start. After winning gold, Flowers had to quickly hire a sports agent to help her field calls from the likes of Jay Leno, David Letterman, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Ebony magazine and others.

Jennifer Rodriguez, winner of two Olympic bronze medals in speed skating, is the daughter of a Cuban-American man. She found her way to speed skating after tooling around on roller skates in the warm, sunny climes of her native Miami while she was growing up.

“All the ice rinks are in the so-called ‘white areas,”‘ she told the San Francisco Chronicle. “What we need to do is build some rinks in areas where kids have never seen speed skating before.”

Other speed-skating stars include Mexican-American Derek Parra, a native of Southern California, who was the Olympic 1500-meter gold medalist and 5000-meter silver medalist. Parra trained several hours a day while holding down a job at Home Depot in order to help pay bills.

Then there’s 19-year-old short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, perhaps America’s newest media darling, who has good looks, tons of talent and a troubled history as a juvenile. His single-parent father Yuki, a Japanese American, kept Apolo out of the gang life in the Seattle area by directing his son’s energies toward athletics.

Each of these athletes, along with others on the U.S. team, like figure skater Michelle Kwan, hockey player Julie Chu and bobsledders Doug Sharp and Garrett Hines, have helped colorize the monotone image of the Winter Games.

In a time when Americans are struggling with issues of racial profiling, immigration and cultural identity, it’s important to pay tribute to these athletes who triumphed at the Olympics.

 Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of “The Morning Show” on KPFA radio in Berkeley, Calif. Her e-mail address is pmproj@progressive.org.