AS HE CIRCLED THE ICE of a Moscow arena last February in a troika-the traditional Russian three-horse sled-Chicago speedskater Shani Davis wore a huge wreath about his chest, a gold medal around his neck and the widest of grins across his face.
Alongside Davis in the sled for the victory lap, decked out similarly, was Germany’s Anni Friesinger, his fellow winner in the World All-Around Speedskating Championships. The white horses moved as swiftly and smoothly around the ice to celebrate the riders’ triumph as the skaters themselves had hours before.
Davis was wearing the same grin as he recalled his victory seven months later, at a Pan-Asian restaurant in Calgary. “Seeing your name in first place on that big screen in Russia,” he said over bee-bim bop, “having all those people witness it, having something to call home about, to tell your friends and family, that was so nice.”
It had been another history-making moment for Davis, who became the first black skater to win his sport’s most prestigious annual competition, doing so with a record score.
It also was a rare moment of smooth sledding in the often-controversial career of the 23-year-old skater.
On the surface, the world title and his other achievements might explain why Davis’ name for months stood out in darker type from those of the other elite athletes listed on the Web site of United States Speedskating, the group that governs the sport in this country. After all, last season Davis also became the only U.S. skater ever to win medals in the same season in the long-track World All-Around and World Sprint Championships and in the short-track World Championships.
“The guy is awesome,” says U.S. skater Kip Carpenter, a 2002 Olympic bronze medalist.
Davis’ stunning ability could bring him another milestone this week at the U.S. Olympic short-track speedskating trials in Marquette, Mich. Barring something unforeseen, he will seek to accomplish what no speedskater has ever done: earn the right to compete in the sport’s two disciplines, short track and long track, at the same Olympics. He already has all but clinched spots on the U.S. team in three long-track races and is considered likely to win multiple Olympic medals when the 2006 Winter Games unfold next February in Turin, Italy.
You should be able to get that information and see a photo of Davis on the speedskating federation’s site. But that is where this starts to get complicated. When you click on his name, nothing happens. The reason? Davis and his mother, Cherie, are at war with U.S. Speedskating.
Says Eric Heiden, considered the greatest speedskater in history: “You certainly get the sense it is sort of him and his mom against the world.”
The Davises insist that the federation not profit in any way from the efforts of a young man who, in the words of federation president Andy Gabel, “can certainly be the face of U.S. speedskating at the 2006 Olympics if he performs at the exceptional level he is capable of.”
That it is a black face makes Davis different from the 101 other athletes listed on the Web site. That distinction has come to tinge nearly everything about this story-which is one of conflict, dedication, irony, paradox and a degree of complexity improbable for a person still so young. It is like an onion with infinite layers, its core elusive.
“Shani just wants to go fast and stay out of trouble,” says his girlfriend, Canadian speedskater Shannon Rempel. “He goes fast, but he doesn’t always stay out of trouble.”
Much of the controversy is created by how Cherie Davis reacts to what she sees as the federation’s repeated efforts to discriminate against and take advantage of her only child.
“She plays the race card early and often,” says Jim Jeter of St. Louis, an international speed skating race official, who also is black.
At best, she is an involved, supportive, protective parent, some of whose complaints have been justified. She has had to force U.S. Speedskating more than once to back off or give Shani what was owed him.
At worst, she is an alienating firebrand, whose e-mail attacks on members of the speedskating community have included calling them names so inflammatory-“KKK,” “white supremacist,” “neo-Nazi genetic mutation”-they render recipients like Bonnie Blair speechless.
Blair, a member of the U.S. Speedskating board of directors, won five Winter Olympic gold medals and became an icon of the sport before retiring a decade ago. Shani Davis also is a board member, having been elected in December 2004 as an athlete-representative.
Blair, a world champion in long track and short track, will talk for 15 minutes in general terms about the advantages of training for both disciplines. Ask her to talk specifically about how that helps Shani Davis, and she declines.
“I have been told not to talk about him, or have anything to do with him, from his mom,” Blair said. “I would rather not comment, which is unfortunate.”
In e-mail and postings to shanidavis.org, the skater’s personal Web site, Cherie Davis has blistered Blair for her TV commentary and alleged Blair’s actions as a board member favored “rich friends.” Though Shani says, “I love Bonnie Blair. She is a great athlete and truly an inspiration,” he stands behind his mother unequivocally.
“I’m just like my mom,” he said not long ago in Calgary, his primary training base. “We would always fight for what we believe was right. That is probably why I always got into trouble when I was younger.
“We would take things in our own hands and try to make the ideal situation for myself. Sometimes that hurt me more than it helped. But in the long run it made me the strong person I am today. I’m very happy she went out there and took life by the horns instead of trying to dodge [federation officials] all the time. I need someone to fight for me.”
Not that scrapping is alien to Shani. He was asked to leave both St. Benedict’s High School in Chicago and Lake Placid High School in New York after his involvement in fights.
On the ice, Davis is also fighting symbolically for two friends whose skating dreams never were fulfilled. One is Walli Kadiri, an unheralded former Evanston skater whom Davis calls his speedskating hero and whose career ended after an eligibility controversy. Davis also gets inspiration from Andrew Young, an Evanston speedskater slain nine years ago not far from Davis’ home in East Rogers Park.
Davis, in turn, is an inspiration to the children of D.C. Ice, the only predominantly black speedskating club in the U. S., based at Ft. Dupont Ice Arena in Washington, D.C.
Photos and tributes to Davis have decorated the Washington rink’s walls since he first visited after the 2002 Olympics. Among them are some poems written by the young writers’ club at a Washington middle school. One is titled, “Shani, Just Like Me.” Its final lines are:
He’s Superman on ice
as black as a cougar
That’s what makes it so nice.
If only it were that simple.
FOR THE PAST THREE SEASONS, Shani Davis has based himself in Calgary and trained at the 1988 Olympic speedskating oval there to distance himself from U.S. Speedskating’s training programs. “He’s like ‘Mystery, Alaska,”‘ says Carpenter, who trains in Salt Lake City.
On a cold, gloomy late-summer day in Calgary, Davis was doing a short-track workout, joining four skaters of distinctly lesser ability for five sets of 12 laps around the 111-meter short-track course. The coach, Yvon DeBlois, was hoping for a 10.2-second-per-lap pace. The group began skating, with Davis in front, the only sounds the whoosh of the air they were moving and the occasional tick of a blade on the ice. At each turn, Davis slowed imperceptibly and leaned inward, the fingertips of his gloved left hand touching the ice for stability. His first lap was 9.97 seconds. He settled into a 10-second pace, then speeded up, closing with three laps of 9.95 and a finale of 9.86.
Davis finished half a lap ahead of everyone else, then propped himself on cushions above the ice to have his blades adjusted. He sat out the next set, cheering the remaining skaters.
Though it had been two weeks since Davis moved into a new Calgary apartment, the decor remained something best described as contemporary carton. Boxes containing a lamp, coffeemaker and Dirt Devil vacuum sat unopened between the small living room and even smaller kitchen. The only things that had been carefully seen to were the video games Davis plays relentlessly with his apartment mate, Alex Moritz of Ontario, an equipment technician for Canada’s speedskating team.
“This game is time well wasted,” Davis said, grinning, as he battled The Incredible Hulk.
Video games have always been a constant. When Cherie Davis would take her hyperactive 6-year-old to burn off energy at a Chicago roller rink, he would humor her by circling the track a couple of times before asking for quarters and zipping off to the rink’s video arcade. She was sure he preferred the video games to skating, but saw that hurtling around the ice as fast as possible also made him happy.
At the time, Cherie and Shani were living down the street from the University of Chicago running track in Hyde Park. She worked as secretary for Chicago lawyer Fred Benjamin, then president of the Illinois Speedskating Association. One day, he asked her to type some speedskating documents, and she asked how her son might try the sport. Benjamin told her about clubs in Northbrook and Evanston, mentioning that the Evanston club always had included several black skaters.
“I thought there would be a comfort level there,” Benjamin says, and he was right.
“I felt like I was on a South Side playground with ice,” Shani Davis says.
As he began to fall in love with the sport, the ride from the South Side to the north suburbs became an issue. So Cherie moved to a place just south of Howard Street, barely a mile from Evanston’s Robert Crown Center ice rink. As Shani’s involvement grew, she began working two jobs to pay for a sport that can cost even a young skater $5,000 a year in ice time, coaching, equipment and travel expenses to meets.
“If it weren’t for Cherie, there is no way he could have stuck with it all these years,” Benjamin says.
Cherie and Shani have always felt they were doing this on their own, logistically and financially. Shani’s father, Reggie Shuck, stopped living with the family six months after his son was born. From then on, the part he played in Shani’s life was, as in the case of many separated parents, a matter of perspective-and a sensitive subject to Shuck, who thinks he is unfairly characterized as a largely absent father.
“To be honest, he really hasn’t been in my life that much, but he gets so upset if you say that,” Shani Davis says. “He says he has been there, but I don’t think so, because he never wanted to be bothered. We would have to beg him to get me to practices; he wouldn’t give my mom money when we needed it.
“He wanted me to play basketball, football, sports that typically African-Americans would do. He never cared for the skating. I love my dad . . . He supports skating now, that’s probably the best way you can put it.”
Shuck, now married with a daughter, bears a striking resemblance to Shani. He insists that far more binds them than physical likeness.
“Everyone would like to have a two-parent family like the Cleavers, but in the modern day, 35 percent of women who have children are unmarried and 50 percent of people are divorced,” Shuck says. “I was always in Shani’s life. I took him to tens of dozens of practices and dozens and dozens of meets when he was just getting started.
“If Shani would have lived with me, he would probably be in the NFL now playing defensive back, making way more money and not having problems in the speedskating world.”
The feeling that their son would have been better off in any sport but speedskating is one area where his parents agree. Neither seems to grasp, even now, the extent of his passion for a sport foreign to African-American kids.
“From the time I was 6 or 7, I heard from black people and white people that black kids don’t do this,” Shani says. “No one really seemed to approve that I loved skating.”
One who did understand was Sanders Hicks, known as Sam, founder of the Evanston Speed-skating Club and first coach of most of the club’s skaters for 40 years. “Shani was the easiest kid I ever had to train,” Hicks says. If Hicks asked him to run 18 times up Mt. Trashmore, Evanston’s landfill hill, Davis would do 23, then run a mile around the adjacent park.
“There is an incredible inner drive in Shani,” says Bob Fenn of Milwaukee, one of the half-dozen coaches with whom Davis variously works. “If someone says, ‘Shani, jump off the sixth story,’ he will answer, ‘But the building is 10? Why can’t I do 10?”‘
Combined with Davis’ work ethic is what skaters call a feel for the ice. The strength and endurance he has developed allow him to exert tremendous pressure to push off at the start of each alternating stroke-one leg, then the other-that propels a skater. The trick is to feel how long to glide after each push before shifting weight to push with the other leg. Glide too long, and you lose speed. Shift too frequently, and you expend too much energy. It all changes according to distance, with the long-track sprints, 500 and 1,000 meters, requiring faster turnover. And in short track, everything gets complicated by race tactics and contact.
In long-track skating, athletes compete in pairs on a 400-meter oval, with time determining results after all pairs have skated. Longer races are deadly dull to all but the sport’s most knowledgeable enthusiasts.
In short track, four to six competitors race together on a much shorter (111-meter) oval, and each race produces a winner or qualifiers for the next round of the competition. The limited confines inevitably lead to collisions, falls, disqualifications and roller derby-like excitement.
“To me,” Carpenter says, “it’s more amazing that he can do well in both the 1,000 and 5,000 than be able to go back and forth between long track and short track.”
Olympic short-track champion Apolo Anton Ohno of the United States sees it differently.
“He is attempting the impossible,” Ohno says of Davis trying to qualify in both short and long track. “No one else in the world can do it except this kid.”
Says Evanston’s Jack Mortell, the 1992 Olympic short-track coach: “He has ungodly talent. At some point, no one will be as good as Shani.”
YOU CAN LEARN ALL YOU NEED to about short track from the last five seconds of the 1,000-meter final at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City: Four of the five skaters fell in a chain reaction of crashes, while Australia’s Steven Bradbury, almost half a lap behind going into the last turn, glided past the chaos to win the gold medal.
Both the blades and abilities needed for the two disciplines are entirely different. The skills are counterintuitive: Although the long-track straightaway is as lengthy as an entire short-track lap, ability to maximize speed through the turns is considered more critical in long track, and no one in the world does that better than Davis. A misstep in a long-track sprint is more damaging than one at the same distance in short track, where a skater can draft back to the lead.
Long-track speedskating has been part of the Olympics since the first Winter Games in 1924. Short track was a “demonstration” sport in 1988 before gaining full-medal status in 1992.
In North America, until former in-line speedskaters began trying ice skating in the 1990s, most long-track skaters began either in short track or a variation called “pack-style long track.” Champions like Blair and Gaetan Boucher of Canada both won short-track and long-track championships in the 1970s and 1980s.
“After 1988, you didn’t see people doing both,” coach DeBlois said.
Davis does it because he loves short track, because he loves to defy both convention and the opinions of those who remind him, with unassailable logic, that he is an extraordinary long-track skater and merely very good in short track. At 6-feet, 3-inches and 185 pounds, with long legs and arms, he is a relative giant among the top short trackers, making him prone to collisions and disqualifications and reducing his chances to exploit small openings that occur during races.
“Short track has been very beneficial in Shani’s training, but I don’t think he has the body to be a good short-track skater,” Heiden says. “He has many years ahead of being a successful long-track skater provided he doesn’t get hurt. That is my main concern for him.”
Rusty Smith, a 2002 Olympic bronze medalist in short track, nearly had his nose sliced off by another competitor’s skate blade after a fall at the 2004 World Championships, an accident some say has affected his aggressiveness. Davis, whom Mortell calls, “absolutely fearless,” took a hard fall at a short-track event in September.
“What makes short track fun is it’s a gamble, like rolling the dice,” Davis says. Yet it is that aspect of the sport that makes Davis say he would prefer a long-track Olympic gold medal to one in short track. “There would be no question about whether I deserved the medal or not,” he says. “It wouldn’t be because someone fell down or was disqualified, just my maximum efforts to try to get the gold.”
In short track, where the dice often are loaded with subjective judging about disqualifications for contact, Davis’ maximum efforts to make the 2002 Olympic event ended in bitter controversy over race fixing. That not only catalyzed his estrangement from U.S. Speedskating but his subsequent rise to the top of the long-track world, in which he earned about $100,000 last year in prize money, U.S. Olympic Committee funding and from his now contentious contract with DSB, a Dutch bank that sponsors athletes.
In the Netherlands, speedskating is both popular culture and among the top three spectator sports. Four million people watched the Dutch telecast of Davis’ victory in the 2005 world all-around meet, according to DSB sports director Toon Gerbrands. That was 25 percent of the country’s population and 70 percent of those watching TV during that time slot.
Dutch interest in short-track skating, however, is negligible. The Dutch could not understand why Davis chose to go to the 2005 World Short Track Championships rather than defend his long-track World Single Distance title in the 1,500-especially since they consider that distance the best measure of a skater, blending speed and endurance.
“To us, that was like one of your football teams making the Super Bowl and then deciding not to come,” Gerbrands says.
In the U.S., speedskating exists for two weeks every four years, during the Winter Olympics, and even then attention paid it is relatively minimal. Unless, that is, the Olympics are in the U.S., as they were when Heiden won all five men’s events in 1980, as they were when Davis saw his Olympic dream turn into a nightmare in 2002.
Davis needed to win the last race of the 2002 Olympic trials, the 1,000 meters, to make the team as a relay alternate. Although the 1,000 was an event in which he had set a U.S. junior record, no one expected him to beat Ohno, who had won every other race in the trials meet.
Davis did win, and for a few hours was hailed as the first black skater to make the U.S. Olympic team. Then accusations began flying, and Tommy O’Hare-the skater who lost the final Olympic spot to Davis–filed a complaint with U.S. Speedskating. He claimed that Ohno, who is Davis’ good friend, and Smith had conspired to let Davis make the team. While an arbitrator found none of the athletes had acted improperly, the damage to Davis’ reputation was done.
The speedskating federation brought in University of Utah sports psychologist Keith Henschen, who has worked with the NBA’s Utah Jazz, to help the short-track team members put the problems behind them before the Olympics.
“I don’t think Shani ever was comfortable with the situation,” Henschen says. “He was accepted, but not by a portion of the group.”
Davis, who had not expected to compete in the Olympics, decided to leave Salt Lake City before the relay to skate in Italy at the World Junior Championships in long track, where he won the 1,500 meters. It was a sign of things to come.
“I wasn’t sad about not skating the relay, because I wasn’t ready,” Davis says. “I’m more sad about how people turned on me and looked at me and judged me. I was ridiculed and my name dragged through the mud.”
Mortell, U.S. Speedskating’s short-track program director in 2002, steadfastly maintains there was no conspiracy. He is not as sure about what sparked the accusations.
“All those guys were just jealous, thinking ‘Why Shani and not me?’ ” Mortell says. “Could there have been a racial aspect to it? I would have to admit that was a possibility.”
“There was no evidence he was treating me like that because of my race . . . But I had been asked those questions too many times in my life to shrug off the anger they raised in my heart.”
–Walter Mosley, “Little Scarlet.”
Cherie Davis, 55, grew up in a middle-class family and says she experienced no racism until Shani was born. Both her parents were educators; her father, Earl, was assistant principal at Nichols Middle School in Evanston for 11 years.
“I don’t tolerate people abusing my son,” she says. “After the 2002 Olympic Games, I changed completely. I stopped trying to work with those people [speedskating federation leaders].”
Cherie Davis filed a grievance when U.S. Speedskating fined Shani for refusing to take part in the opening ceremony at the 2003 short-track national championships. The hearing panel ruled in her favor, saying his desire not to join in publicity for the federation was reasonable.
She complained to the U.S. Olympic Committee after the speedskating federation tried to charge Shani $8,000 to participate in last summer’s training camp and take classes at the University of Northern Michigan. Then she outfoxed the federation by asking for an itemized list of the fees, which, it turned out, are not itemized as such but are amounts the federation receives as discretionary funds from the USOC to cover athlete costs in such training camps. The USOC ordered speedskating officials to admit Davis immediately to the program at no cost to him.
Prior to that, Cherie Davis had filed another grievance over the federation’s Feb. 3, 2005, decision to exclude her son from national team programs-including some $6,000 in annual funding plus travel expenses-because he chose to wear the DSB logo in long-track events rather than that of the new team sponsor, Qwest. Other U.S. skaters, including 2004 world all-around champion Chad Hedrick, faced the same situation but decided to forgo national team support and stick with their personal sponsor.
“No complaints,” Hedrick says. “The rules were black and white.”
The logo grievance, yet to be resolved, actually may turn on questions about how clear the rules were. But as soon as the federation dropped Shani from its programs, articles critical of Qwest were posted on shanidavis.org, causing the federation to fear losing the sponsorship.
U.S. SPEEDSKATING IS A mom-and-pop operation. Its $3 million annual budget includes $1.4 million cash and the rest as value-in-kind from sponsors. For generations, its leadership has been almost feudal, with power passed down through heredity and friendship among a group from the Upper Midwest. Those familiar with the politics say the federation long has had an “insider vs. outsider mentality,” which can be perceived differently if the outsider is black.
“There is plenty of blame on both sides,” Jeter says of the Davises’ friction with the federation. “If I were a federation with an athlete of the magnitude of Shani, I’d do everything I could to promote him. But Cherie has done everything she could to snub U.S. Speedskating, and that could cost Shani money in the long run.”
When Shani attended his first U.S. Speedskating meeting as a board member last April, Olympic medalist and board member Jennifer Rodriguez gave him a congratulatory hug for winning the world title. Cherie Davis, who attended the open meeting, told Rodriguez in no uncertain terms to stay away from her son, prompting the skater’s husband, K.C. Boutiette, to write her a strongly worded letter that would later be posted on shanidavis.org. According to DSB’s Gerbrands, it had been Boutiette, also an Olympic skater, who recommended the bank include Shani Davis when it was picking U.S. skaters for potential sponsorships.
“I don’t know how far I want to go with this,” Rodriguez says, choosing her words about the incident very carefully. “Whatever I say, it’s going to be wrong, and there will be retaliation. We don’t know how to speak to Shani, so we keep to ourselves. It’s a shame. He is a nice kid.”
Few skaters blame Shani for his mother’s actions. Most agree that it is difficult not to see them as a package because Davis relentlessly thanks her for defending him, telling media in October, “My mom has my back.”
Olympic champion Chris Witty of Milwaukee, who says she has received some pointed e-mails from Davis’ mother, writes it off to her being “an overprotective parent who wants what is best for Shani, not what is best for the organization. I don’t see why people can’t separate them.”
Olympic champion Casey FitzRandolph of Verona, Wis., and his father, Jeff, both on the federation board, have been targets of some of Cherie’s most virulent e-mail attacks. Casey FitzRandolph no longer absolves Shani of blame.
“I tried for years to separate the two of them and be kind to Shani, to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this year I decided he was old enough to be his own person,” FitzRandolph says. “He simply could apologize for the personal attacks his mother has given to everybody or just say my mother doesn’t speak for me. The whole thing is unfortunate.”
Heiden, now an orthopedist, was speedskating’s team doctor at the last two world all-around meets, where he was impressed by Shani and his skating. He says he has had no interaction with Cherie.
“I think Shani has a chance to use his Olympic results for financial advancement-sponsorships and that type of thing,” Heiden said. “But I would be concerned if I was a big corporation if I was dealing with someone who has the history of Shani’s mom.”
When she asked Peter Carlisle, who represents swimming megastar Michael Phelps, to be Shani’s agent, Cherie Davis wondered if she might be too controversial for Carlisle. But Cherie didn’t tone down her rhetoric after he agreed in September to represent Shani.
“I’m not going to say, ‘You be nice to my son, and we’ll be good little black people,”‘ she says. “Regardless of whether or not they hate me, they are supposed to do the right thing.”
In response to my e-mail asking why she used such explosive language in some of her e-mails, Cherie Davis replied, “I was there when everything happened to Shani-you were not-but you keep trying to discredit and/or make light of what happened. The story is about Shani, not about me. I did my job PERIOD, end of story.”
Says Carlisle: “I represent Shani, not Cherie, as important as she is. He is an impressive kid with a great story to tell.”
In a 12-lap race six weeks ago at the Calgary Oval, an official mistakenly gave Davis the “one-lap-to-go” signal a lap too early. At the end of the race, Shani Davis berated the official for his error. Meet referee Jim McClements said the skater used the f-word. Davis says he did not swear but, four days later, he apologized for his reaction. McClements said he “showed remorse.”
“I don’t want to be portrayed as a disrespectful young man,” Davis says.
SNOW AND ICE LOOK oh-so-white. For years, the athletes from Europe and North America who ruled the sports reflected those playing surfaces.
It was not until 1976, according to the U.S. Olympic Committee, that there was an African-American, figure skater Tai Babilonia, on a U.S. team at the Winter Olympics. In 1980, bobsledders Willie Davenport and Jeff Gadley became the first African-American men on a U.S. team. In 1988, Debi Thomas was the first black U.S. winter medalist, a bronze in figure skating. In 2002, bobsledder Vonetta Flowers was the first gold medalist.
“Not just the first black Winter Olympic gold medalist from the United States, but the world,” Flowers pointed out proudly.
Ironically, U.S. speedskating has the most diversity of any Winter Olympic sport in the country. The influx of in-line skaters in the past decade opened the door to Cuban-American Rodriguez (Florida), Mexican-American Olympic champion Derek Parra (California) and Japanese-American Ohno (Washington state).
Shani Davis has a traditional speedskating background, learning first on ice. But he came to the sport from an unlikely place, the inner city.
When Davis went to high school seven years ago in Lake Placid, where he trained at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, he had a hard time getting haircuts because, says a friend, barbers had no experience with African-American hairstyles.
“I was out of a diverse fish tank and put in one where it was all goldfish,” Davis says.
Davis admits he also had trouble with some of the school’s regulations. He said the fight that precipitated his expulsion owed to his having been repeatedly called “boy” by another skater on a basketball court at the training center.
In 2003, after twice being stopped and allegedly harassed by white Chicago police, Shani Davis joined two other young black men in an ongoing ACLU suit against the city and its police superintendent. All claim they were detained, in essence, for walking while black.
“When you’re African-American, whenever you walk out of your community, you’re thinking, ‘Are you going to be welcome in the next place?’ ” Davis’ father says.
Short-track champion Wilf O’Reilly of Great Britain was the first black speedskater to make the Olympics, winning two races in 1988, when short track still was not an official part of the Olympic program. Davis was the next.
Flowers was not the only black U.S. bobsledder in 2002. Three black men won silver medals.
“It hasn’t been difficult for me at all,” she says. “I have been accepted. But I’m sure it is tough [for Shani] to be the only black face in his sport.”
Evanston club founder Hicks, 78, knows just how hard. Not long after becoming the city’s first African-American firefighter in 1950, he found a set of dinner plates that had been painted red and labeled with his name. That way, none of the other firefighters would eat off plates used by a black man.
“They tried everything in their power to try to get me to leave,” Hicks says. “I decided after four years I loved the job, and no one would keep me from doing it. I think that’s the way Shani feels about speedskating.”
Hicks went on to spend 37 years in the department, the final seven as chief. Starting with his son, Brady, he’s been coaching skaters in Evanston since the mid-1960s. Some years, a dozen were black.
“Everyone thought it was great I had black kids involved in skating until they started to beat the other skaters,” Hicks says. “Suddenly they started to find reasons why we shouldn’t be skating.”
That is what happened to Walli Kadiri, who, Shani Davis says on his Web site, “should’ve been the first.”
“I always told my kids the nice thing about speedskating is when you won something, they couldn’t take it away from you,” Hicks says, leaving the irony of those words to speak for themselves.
In 1993, Kadiri finished eighth in the trials to select 16 short-track skaters for the U.S. Olympic Festival later that year. After the meet, the parent of a skater who stood to benefit from Kadiri’s exclusion told U.S. Speedskating Kadiri was not a U.S. citizen.
U.S. citizenship generally was a prerequisite for Olympic Festival participation, but the USOC allowed foreign athletes in this development competition if they intended to seek citizenship. Had U.S. Speedskating chosen to advocate for Kadiri, then 17, the USOC could have let him compete.
Kadiri, born in Nigeria, moved to the U. S. at age 4. As a teenager, he lived with an aunt and uncle in Evanston because his mother had deserted the family, and his father had returned to Nigeria without taking care of his children’s immigration status.
Kadiri is a telecom specialist for SBC, married with a 5 -month-old daughter. He still holds an Illinois short-track record for mid-level men’s skaters.
“I definitely think race played a part in it,” Kadiri says of being barred from the Festival. “I soured on skating after that. My heart wasn’t in it the way it had been.”
Kadiri quit skating in 1994. He now finds himself “flattered beyond words” by Davis calling him his skating hero.
“I feel vindicated by his success,” Kadiri says. “What people see him do now is what I could have done. Maybe it wasn’t meant for me to do it. Maybe it was meant for me to inspire Shani to do it.”
Kadiri and his friend, Andrew Young, watched out for Shani Davis from the time he first began skating with the Evanston club in 1989. Seven years later, as he was driving on Howard Street with friends, Young, 19, was shot and killed by a Latino teen in a gang-related case of mistaken identity.
His friend’s death unnerved Davis so much, his father said, that he often refused to go to a nearby park without an adult accompanying him. It also brought a focus to Davis’ life.
“I started taking things more seriously, and skating was one of those,” Davis said. “In my neighborhood, there was a lot of tension between Hispanics and blacks. I wanted to make sure I did the right things, and one of those was to skate and stay away from all that.”
At Andrew Young’s funeral, Davis told Young’s father, Stephen, that he would try to fulfill his son’s dream of success in skating. Nine years later, Stephen Young remains touched that Davis still has Andrew in his thoughts.
“If Shani wins a gold medal at the Olympics, I will cry,” Young says.
Says Davis, “Andrew was like a big brother to me.”
Andrew Young was white.
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phersh@tribune.com
