updated 4:42 p.m. ET Feb. 19, 2006

CESANA, Italy - Arms folded defiantly across his chest, Andre Lange stood in the starting chute and stared down at an icy track with snow piled up nearly as high as the accusations.

Once inside his sled, Germany’s steady-handed driver steered around it all.

And when he was safely at the bottom, Lange stood in the front seat and raised his arms in victory. He turned a twisting Italian track into his own Alpine autobahn on Sunday, plowing Germany-1 through falling flakes and suspicions that his team cheated to win an Olympic gold in two-man bobsled.

Lange and hulking brakeman Kevin Kuske finished with a four-run time of 3 minutes, 43.38 seconds to defeat Canada’s Pierre Lueders, who a day earlier accused Germany of some funny business with the runners on their high-tech rides.

Afterward, Lueders refused to point a finger at the Germans again.

“The race is over,” he said stoically, dodging a question. “We have another race (four-man) to focus on, and that’s what we’ll do.”

Lueders and his brakeman, Jamaican-born Lascelles Brown, were .21 seconds behind the Germans. Switzerland’s Martin Annen captured bronze, duplicating his Olympic feat of four years ago in Utah.

For Todd Hays, the no-nonsense, kickboxing Texan who ended the U.S. bobsled team’s 46-year medal drought with a silver in four-man at the Salt Lake City Games, there would be no podium finish this time.

He and brakeman Pavle Jovanovic could do no better than seventh.

“Could be worse,” said Hays, who will have another crack at gold in the four-man race this weekend, his preferred event. “We just couldn’t perform well. Really, no excuses. We just got beat and I think the best team won the race.”

Slide show   Pictures of the Day Check out Sunday's best Olympic images.

Not everyone might agree.

On Saturday, team officials from six countries, including the U.S. and Canada, convened to discuss the possibility that the Germans’ supersonic sleds were equipped with illegal front runners.

Although suspicion has trailed the world’s premier sledding power for some time, a German newspaper this week alleged that a company in Dresden has treated some of the runners with “plasma immersion implants” which make the runners faster on ice.

Lange, who won a gold in four-man in 2002, insisted the Germans sled are clean.

“They have done many checks on the material and they found that everything is 100 percent OK,” he said. “I was never attacked personally. The bobsled, which is built in Berlin, undergoes very strict controls and all controls have come out OK.

“There are always people who make a big fuss of everything but at some point I stop listening to them.”

However, the talk of German underhandedness may continue.

An Olympic jury will inspect the medal-winning sleds and another one chosen randomly from the field.

Slide show   Emotional Moments Feb. 26: See photos of athletes' highs and lows from Sunday.

Hays said he would be stunned if anything was found that showed the Germans were up to no good.

“I’d be very surprised if they were,” he said. “If you watch Lange’s trips, all four trips, all four starts, he was great. I don’t know that he would have needed hot runners to win it today. That’s the best two-man team in the world. They deserve the gold medal.”

The Americans haven’t won one in two-man since 1936, and they’ve now gone without a medal of any sort in that event since 1952. They’re not going to get one until the U.S. figures out how to speed across ice as quickly as the Germans.

The U.S. team’s No. 2 sled of Steven Holcomb and Bill Schuffenhauer was never in contention and finished 14th.

Schuffenhauer said discussion that the Germans aren’t up to something devious won’t end until somebody slides past them.

“There have been some things in the past that have really been kind of suspicious,” he said. “In between runs, everybody’s up there sanding their runners and the Germans are over there smoking cigarettes, then they go down and blast everybody. You’ve got to wonder what’s going on.

“Until we have solid facts, you’ve just kind of got to go with the flow. If they’re getting away with something, there’s nothing we can do about it for now.”

Heavy snow that blanketed the mountainsides above postcard-perfect Cesana began to fall harder on the 19-curve course before the first sleds made their way down.

At Olympic bobsled’s equivalent to halftime, Hays, a former linebacker at Tulsa, was in sixth place — .52 seconds behind Lange and .32 seconds away from a bronze — following two sub-par runs on Saturday which he blamed on using front runners better suited for colder temperatures.

His third and fourth runs in the shiny black USA-1 weren’t much better, and Hays actually dropped back one spot from where he was Sunday morning. And as is always the case, the rugged 36-year-old accepted full blame.

“Runners, sleds, suspensions, you name it, I chose wrong,” he said. “I didn’t make the right choices with equipment. But I don’t think with the way we started would have made a difference. I’m not going to try to act like it was the sled or the runners. We got beat at the start.

“I didn’t drive well enough to get it done.”

Other than Lange, no one did.

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