Shani Davis began speedskating when he was 6 years old.
“I couldn’t stand up on my feet,” he recalled.
He has better balance now. And he moves a little faster, too. Fast enough to make the U.S. Olympic short-track speedskating team and fast enough last weekend to set an American record in the 1,000 meters.
It is the event he does best and it is the event that put him on the team as the first black U.S. speedskater. It is also the event that embroiled him in a controversy not of his own making and soured what should have been a joyful time.
Davis, 19, was raised by a single mother determined to keep him out of trouble while he was growing up in Hyde Park. Cherie Davis made many sacrifices, financial and otherwise, to keep her son busy–she fought rush-hour traffic to drive him everywhere–and she had him run a mile a day as a 2nd-grader.
“Trouble was never an option for him,” she said. “Standing on a corner, I never had to discuss that with him because I kept him active.”
Early on Davis skated at the Evanston Skating Club, where his role model was Wally Kadir, another black skater. Ironically, considering his status as a pioneer, so many other young black kids were involved that Davis thought speedskating was a predominantly black sport.
What began as a hobby grew in importance as Davis improved. He traveled throughout the Midwest, to events in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and elsewhere. It all seemed exotic to him.
“It was fun at first to go anywhere,” Davis said. “Wherever it was, was an adventure to me.”
Nothing was more fun than qualifying for the Olympics at the December trials. Going into the last day’s 1,000-meter event Davis sat eighth in the point standings. The top six finishers automatically qualified for the U.S. team. The only way Davis could make it was by winning, a daunting task considering that until then Apolo Ohno, the top American, had won every heat, semifinal and final he contested.
But the 1,000 is Davis’ best event and he stunned the crowd at the Utah Olympic Oval by winning the final ahead of Rusty Smith, Ohno and Ron Biondo. Soon after, Tommy O’Hare of St. Louis, who lost his position on the team with Davis’ ascension, charged that Smith and Ohno, who is a good enough friend of Davis’ to borrow his shirts when they go to parties, conspired to fix the race, letting Davis win and blocking out Biondo.
The incident was finally settled by an independent arbitrator who ruled after a three-day hearing last month that no skater was guilty of misconduct. However, the matter lingered for a month and Davis said he was distracted at the world junior championships in Korea, upset over the suspicion cast on his win.
“It was hard,” Davis said. “You had to really defend your honor. When I first got off the ice I was so happy. Then it was, `What’s going on here?’ It got pretty bad. I just tried to look at the bright thing. I was on the team. I try not to hold any grudge. But I won’t forget it.”
Davis said his friendship with Ohno didn’t change “before, during, or after” the controversy.
Although he did not qualify for an individual event and has a chance to skate only in the relay, Davis said his skating is on the upswing. He proved that last week by breaking his own American record with a time of 1 minute 26.677 seconds in the 1,000 at a race in Calgary. Davis finished second in the event at a meet that included skaters from 15 countries.
Davis says he hopes to skate in the Games, in part to attract other minorities to the sport.
“If it’s shown on television and they see me, great,” Davis said. “I think everybody should do speedskating.”
Later he amended his point of view. “I would think socially, it would be based on what I accomplish, rather than my color.”
