In a bizarre finish with skaters strewn all over the ice and fans booing, Apolo Anton Ohno claimed a silver medal Saturday night by crawling across the finish line of the men’s 1,000-meter short-track speedskating race.
The last man standing in the five-man final, Steven Bradbury of Australia, won the gold medal, coming from last place in the stretch when everyone else hit the deck. The scene resembled a multiple-car pileup on an interstate highway.
As race speed increased on the ninth and last lap on 111-meter track, Ohno barely avoided one entanglement, only to be taken down by Korean Hyun-Soo Ahn.
Ohno crashed into the boards, desperately tried to climb back to his feet, stumbled and sprawled across the finish line in second.
He will need stitches for the cut in his leg he got during the crash. He limped out to receive his medal after the race.
Jianjun Li of China was disqualified for starting the whole mess.
Ahn didn’t get up fast enough, and Canada’s Mathieu Turcotte nabbed bronze as Bradbury dodged all of the damage and skated across unmolested with his hands in the air in celebration.
Such dodge-em car accidents are not surprising in short track, a sport known for its rough-and-tumble elbowing and banging.
Ohno, 19, of Seattle, who has been projected as the American glamour athlete of the Winter Olympics because of his potential to win four gold medals, had warned that he would have to be wearing a lucky golden horseshoe to sweep the 2002 medals.
He was greeted enthusiastically by the 15,000-plus Delta Center fans. There was clearly no fallout from the controversy stemming from the U.S. trials. It was alleged after that event that Ohno helped fix a race to benefit a friend, but he was later exonerated.
Yuki Ohno, the skater’s father, a hairstylist who raised Apolo as a single parent, often keeps his scissors at the ready while near his son’s wavy brown hair, but Ohno’s hair trailed out the back of his yellow competition helmet as he raced.
Earlier Ohno blew away the field in his heat, cruising home with enough time to glance back as he closed on the finish.
The first semifinal foreshadowed the final: It included two crashes sending three racers to the deck.
Ohno, who made his international reputation by winning the 2001 World Cup championship and by placing second in the world shot track championships, had a trouble-free semifinal .
In a less controversial final, Yang Yang of China won gold in the women’s 500, with Evgenia Radnova of Bulgaria taking silver and Chunlu Wang of China earning bronze. Caroline Hallisey of Natick, Mass. made the final but was last.
The U.S. women’s 3,000-meter relay team ran into disaster in the semifinals. Early on Hallisey took a tumble and the Americans fell off the pace.
“It’s a 27-lap race, so anything could have happened with the three teams in front of us,” Erin Porter of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. said of Canada, Bulgaria and South Korea. “So we kept racing. But they all skated clean races.
“We practiced it a million times. One small mishap and the race is over.”
Amy Peterson, 30, of Maplewood, Minn., a five-time Olympian who carried the American flag during the Opening Ceremony was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the women’s 500.
“In my second race, I kind of got boxed at the start,” Peterson said.
Rusty Smith, 22, of Sunset Beach, Calif., was the other American in the men’s 1,000. He drew a very difficult quarterfinal and was eliminated.
