Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 11, 1992 TAG: 9202110117
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ALBERTVILLE, FRANCE LENGTH: Long
U.S. SPEED SKATER STRIKES GOLD
The Bonnie Blair 500, a speed-skating spectacular by the world's fastest woman on blades, gave the United States its first gold medal of the Winter Games.Blair, a red, white and blue blur, crouched aerodynamically lower than all her rivals and rocketed into Olympic history Monday with the first back-to-back golds at 500 meters.
Fueled by an all-American peanut butter and jelly sandwich just as she was in Calgary, and cheered by the Blair Bunch of 50 flag-waving friends and relatives from Champaign, Ill., she overcame an hour's delay in the race and the burden of breaking the U.S. medal jinx.
The U.S. team, which hadn't won a Winter gold since Blair's last one in Calgary, desperately needed the boost.
There were moral victories but still no medals for the U.S. men's singles luge team. Duncan Kennedy, coming off a second-place finish on the World Cup circuit, scored the highest Olympic finish ever for an American male slider with his 10th place. And Wendel Suckow matched the previous best U.S. finish, 12th.
Kennedy, who was 14th in 1988, said he expected a medal in Albertville's two-day competition. But he wound up 1.489 seconds behind winner Georg Hackl of Germany, the 1988 silver medalist, whose combined time for four trips down the 1,250-meter run was 3 minutes, 2.363 seconds.
Austria took the silver and the bronze and led the medals chart with two golds and seven overall, three more than Germany and four more than Norway, which won its first-ever 30-kilometer cross country ski gold and scored its first 1-2-3 sweep in a Winter Games event since 1964.
The United States had problems before as well as during the competition.
American downhill skier Megan Gerety and a Norwegian coach were injured in a collision that coaches said was triggered when Gerety ignored a stop signal on a super giant slalom practice course.
Gerety, 20, from Anchorage, Alaska, suffered a sprained and deeply bruised left knee and may not recover in time to compete Saturday. The Norwegian coach, Ole Magne Walaker, suffered a broken leg.
"The course was closed," said Dennis Agee, Alpine director of the U.S. Ski Team. "There was a [Norwegian] coach on the top telling the girls not to run and she just skied right by him. All the girls knew not to go. There were four coaches up there."
The women were preparing to train on the super-G hill after downhill practice was postponed because of heavy snow overnight.
Blair's time, 40.33 seconds on the slow outdoor oval, didn't come close to her world record 39.10 on the indoor track at Calgary, but her flash start gave her the momentum she needed to win the first of the three golds she's going for. She skates Wednesday in the 1,500 and Friday in the 1,000.
"I'm just shaking all over," Blair's mother, Eleanor, said when the winning time was posted. "I held my breath too long, I think. She should have skated faster."
Her gray eyes brimming with tears under a gold cap that read "Go Bonnie Gold," Mrs. Blair hugged four of her other children who made the trip, then was besieged by all their friends.
Blair yanked off her hood as she passed by them, pumped her fist in the air, then high-fived coach Peter Mueller, a 1976 gold medalist in speed skating.
"There's going to be some serious partying tonight," said Blair's brother, Rob.
China's Ye Qiaobo, who missed out on a medal because of a doctor's mistake in 1988, finished second to Blair in another controversy.
"My whole team cried for me," said Ye, who was in tears after she lost precious hundredths of a second in a near-collision with Russia's Elena Tiouchniakova. "Maybe I will never get another chance."
Ye, one of the world's top sprinters the last four years, flunked a drug test just before the 1988 Olympics in Calgary and was suspended for 15 months. The banned substance was a common Chinese medicine that costs the equivalent of a U.S. penny.
Skating in the second pair, Ye pulled ahead of Tiouchniakova after a slow start.
In speed skating, the skater crossing from the outer lane to the inner lane has the right of way because she has skated the longer distance. Tiouchniakova, in the inner lane, didn't immediately yield to Ye, then pulled back when she realized her mistake as the skaters neared the far turn.
The hesitation caused Ye to raise up momentarily, and she estimated the mistake cost her two-tenths of a second. She lost to Blair by 18-hundredths.
Germany's Christa Luding, a 500 gold medalist in 1984 and silver medalist in 1988, won the bronze in 40.51 seconds.
Blair, who said her stomach was doing flip-flops before her first race in Calgary, was only slightly less nervous this time. No American woman had ever won gold medals in any event in consecutive Winter Olympics, and Blair said she had been struggling with her start this year.
She finally got it right.
"The rest of the race I really don't remember that much about," she said. "But I know the last 100 I probably didn't skate as well as I would have liked - maybe just not as relaxed and fluid. But it was good enough, and I'll take it."
The hour's delay, caused by 50-degree weather that melted the ice in the afternoon sun, didn't bother Blair. She went up to her family to calm their nerves, then went back down to relax, have a massage and munch on peanut butter and jelly.
Nor did the problem with Ye affect her.
"Whether she was going to have a reskate or not, I know that I went out there and I skated the best race that I could," Blair said.
Blair, a compact 5 feet 5 and 130 pounds, kept her head down and back arched lower than everyone else, cutting down on wind resistance as she glided flawlessly around the 400-meter oval.
After singing the national anthem on the medal stand, she dedicated the prize to her father, who died two years ago.
"To begin with, it was more of his dream that I'd be in the Olympics before it was ever my dream," she said. "He always said, `Oh, you're going to win a gold medal.' I always thought he was crazy. I was glad that he was with me in 1988, and he was there to see that. This medal definitely goes to him."
Hockey sensation Eric Lindros, the No. 1 draft pick who spurned the NHL's Quebec Nordiques, scored two goals and an assist as Canada beat Switzerland 6-1 and stayed unbeaten and tied with the Unified Team and Czechoslovakia for first place in their six-team group.