Post by stella on Apr 5, 2006 17:19:32 GMT -5
One Thing Perfectly
Apolo Ohno is one of those guys who are famous for seventeen days at a time, twice a decade. His next seventeen days are coming, and they will be borderline insane.
By Chris Jones | Feb 1, 2006
HE FILLS THE WAITING MOSTLY WITH ROUTINE. Every night, like tonight, he returns to his shared dorm room at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs (where he's now spent seven of his twenty-three years), stretches out on his floor's thin carpet, and works on his skates. Having once been held in the hearts of millions, he seems surprisingly comfortable leading a life that's one part machinist, one part monk. First he finds his tool kit, a Tupperware bin filled with wrenches and stones, and next he takes out his skates, which are locked into a jig, blades up. The boots are hard plastic, burgundy and gray; the blades are seventeen inches long—as long as home plate is wide—and silver and gold, like his four-year-old medals. (They're in Seattle, by the way, in his father's new house, which, as it happens, sits on Olympic View Drive, overlooking the Olympic Mountains.) Everything in Apolo Ohno's life hangs on the sharpness and balance of these blades. They are his foundation.
They are also curved slightly to the left to help him grab the corners, but after this morning's practice session and another hundred laps, he felt as if they weren't quite right. By using a radius gauge that can detect flaws to the thousandth of an inch, he finds the wobble—a whisper, really, but plenty enough to keep him up at night. He works the kink with a tool called a bender, crimping the blade and measuring it again and again until the radius gauge tells him that all is right with his world. Then he locks his skates back in their jig and scrapes a square, flat, diamond-laced stone over the blades. He stops occasionally to pluck the metal with his fingertips, like a harpist working his strings, until he is satisfied with some invisible success. Finally, he runs another, smaller stone along the sides of the blades to shave off whatever microscopic burrs his earlier work produced. At last, they are perfect.
It's a little after nine o'clock. He packs up his skates now that they're ready for dawn, and he's ready for bed. In a few hours, he will rise and eat the same breakfast in the same cafeteria and skate the same laps until his blades are dull again, and then, back in his room, he will bend them and sharpen them and polish them, just as he's done every day that's passed since you last had his name on the tip of your tongue.
FOR SEVENTEEN DAYS in February 2002, Apolo Ohno occupied some portion of your brain's hippocampus; every time you flicked through the channels, there he was again. There he was, the short-track speed skater with Samson's hair and that big-toothed smile, reliving his Salt Lake City triumphs with Rosie and Jay and Katie and Conan, as if on a loop. But then, just in the way that winter turns into spring, Ohno faded for you. Someone you pulled so hard for, someone you lived and died with come every fall and push—suddenly he went on a too-short journey from a name to a face to a vague recollection, shoved out of your hippocampus by more immediate concerns and filed away in the almost oceanic depths of your cerebral cortex. For four long years, he's been hiding out there, waiting for another winter, waiting for Turin, waiting for you to remember him again.
Only one thing, in fact, has changed for Ohno, now that he's headed for Italy and a new round of torchlit fame. His coaches have started to pump the sound of a screaming, dyspeptic crowd through the arena loudspeakers in Colorado Springs, breaking the trance of his normally pin-drop-quiet morning practice. The arena looks empty, but it sounds full.
His coaches are doing this because we're not the only ones who might have forgotten.
It's hard for him to explain how exactly, but somewhere along the way Ohno lost the Olympics. Part of it was by design, because athletes are trained to think only of the future and never of the past, running their lives on rails. After each race in Salt Lake City—after each of the heats and quarters and semis; after that crash in the thousand-meter final when he dug his own skate blade into his thigh and, bleeding, stretched across the finish for silver; after he won the fifteen-hundred-meter gold following the controversial disqualification of a South Korean rival for getting a little physical; and especially after he was bumped from the five-hundred-meter podium for pushing a Japanese skater in the second-to-last turn—Ohno would disappear and bury himself in his work on his skates, erasing the memories along with the burrs. "I was so in the moment," he says. "When I'm in the zone like that, when I'm on fire . . ."
But another part of it was something else. Perhaps the Olympic experience is too big and too crazy for one man to take in. Ohno has a flash of looking into the crowd and seeing thousands of cheering fans wearing fake soul patches to match his then-famous facial hair, but then his memory pipeline snaps tight, and all that's left is a trickle of noise and color and sensation. Snapshots give way to impressions and feelings, in the way that he's become one of your million vague recollections. It's as if he went into shock until it was safe to come out again.
"I thought I was prepared for anything," he says. "But the truth is, there's no way you can prepare yourself for that kind of thing. I mean, I was nineteen years old. I was like, What's happening here? What's going on? I never once in my life thought that short track would become that big, or that I would become . . . I don't know what. Some kind of symbol, I guess. It was bizarre to be in the middle of that. It was borderline insanity."
The insanity lasted for a few more weeks. He did the talk-show rounds; he skated across the ice at New York's Rockefeller Center with Katie Couric and cameras in tow; somehow, he even found himself at Oscar after-parties, swept up in fame's red-carpet hysteria. "After- after parties," he says, shaking his head. "I'd be like, Is that Jennifer Love Hewitt? Is that the guy from the Backstreet Boys? I was like, What am I doing here?"
Soon enough, he wasn't there anymore. The monk in him began turning his mind toward returning to church. He weaned himself from the Hollywood life, first by confining it to weekends, and then by rarely leaving his room and the rink at all. But even if Ohno didn't choose to exit the stage, the return to semi-obscurity was probably inevitable, and this he understands. "You don't disappear completely," he says. "Going on a plane, a couple of people might recognize me. But after the Olympics, there's only one way to go. Things have to level off."
And, ultimately, return to a kind of workmanlike normal. Here, at the Olympic Training Center—propped up by the myth that a gold medal is the ticket to lifelong fame and fortune—that's a hard truth to convey. Ohno is the second-longest-tenured resident, the wise old man at twenty-three. (He's earned the right to dress up his room with a big-screen TV and a microwave and overstuffed leather chairs, the way lifer inmates turn their cells into palaces ten feet square.) But there are dozens of fresher-faced wrestlers, gymnasts, boxers, and cyclists here, working out in the pools and weight rooms, getting deep-tissue massages, watching what they eat down to the gram, and every last one of them believes that so long as they do this one thing perfectly, everything else in their lives will fall into place: There will be million-dollar endorsements and Wheaties boxes and everlasting love waiting for them as soon as they step off the podium. They believe their medals will double as passports to a kind of paradise, and it's only guys like Ohno who know better.
"I used to think that," he says. "We all did." Now he knows that whatever stewardship our Olympians might hold over us is almost always temporary. (When was the last time you thought of Kerri Strug?) He knows that one day, maybe as soon as this March, he'll have to quit speed skating and move out of his room and find a job that he can barely stand, and he knows, too, that there will come a day when he gets on a plane and no one gives him a second glance unless it's just because they like his big-toothed smile.
"I'm not set for life, that's for sure," he says. "This ain't the NBA." And as if on cue, his roommate flushes the toilet.
STILL, OHNO WAKES UP at half past six. He heads out to the fenced-in parking lot where he leaves his Lexus—one of the few tangible signs of his fleeting sponsorship success—and makes the short drive to the arena. While the Broadmoor Skating Club finishes up on the ice inside, the stands filled with bleary-eyed parents warming their hands on cups of hot chocolate, he stretches on a bench outside and starts his warm-up jog, leaning into the teeth of a strong Chinook wind.
He returns and gets dressed in the stands, which have emptied along with the ice. He puts on a Lycra body sock, his trademark headband, a helmet, gloves with plastic fingertips for running along the ice, and his skates. He joins about a dozen teammates as they slide blue pads out to line the boards for when they spill, and two large buckets of hot water are dragged to the center of the rink, waiting to fill in the circles they soon begin carving into the clean sheet.
Watching these skaters—which anyone could wander in and do, although this morning not one soul has decided to start his day in the company of Olympians—is an exercise in wonderment. For two-minute bursts, they go so fast, some of them have to wear goggles to keep their eyes from filling with tears, pushed along by the gentle, rhythmic click of their blades and, frankly, their enormous elephant asses. Most of these skaters, the men and the women, have thin, lean frames; from their waists up, they're built like children. But their bottom halves, Ohno's included, almost magically sprout some serious ghetto booty, bleeding into huge thighs that barely taper into massive calves that, all on their own, could have kept that cannibalistic Uruguayan rugby team sated for weeks. Really, they're physical freaks, predisposed since birth to tie on skates and race in tight circles around a rink. It's so clear watching him this morning that this is what Ohno, especially, was born to do.
And it's clear, too, that his enormous elephant ass, more than anything else, is why he came back here. Good thing for him, it has nothing to do with million-dollar endorsements and Wheaties boxes and everlasting love (although those would be nice). And it has nothing to do with the piped-in sound of a screaming, dyspeptic crowd (because no matter how hard his coaches try, they can't get him to remember hearing it anyway). That's not why he's spent eight years in his shared dorm room, and it's not why he wakes up every day at half past six, and it's not why he totes around an instrument that measures the flaws in his blades down to the thousandth of an inch.
He does it because he's one of the lucky ones in this life, having found something he's monstrous at. Unlike most of the rest of us, he wakes up each morning with the chance to be perfect. "There's not one day I don't want to be on the ice," he says, and that's because for two minutes at a time, he is as good as it gets.
"When you compare him to the other top skaters, they all have their strengths, obviously, but there's usually something that's limiting them in some way," says his coach, Derrick Campbell. "Apolo doesn't have that Achilles' heel. Out there, he's complete."
Out there, back on the ice, he is beautiful. He is smooth, machinelike, almost effortless; there's never a hitch in his stride or the hiccup of conscious thought. You'll remember that when you see him again this February. You'll remember his hair and that big-toothed smile. You'll remember how hard you pulled for him four years ago, and how you lived and died with him come every fall and push. Suddenly you'll lift him out of the almost oceanic depths of your cerebral cortex and back into your brain's hippocampus, and Apolo Ohno's name will once again be on the tip of your tongue. For seventeen more days, as if in a dream, everything will be just like it was. Everything will be silver and gold, like winter before it fades into spring.
Apolo Ohno is one of those guys who are famous for seventeen days at a time, twice a decade. His next seventeen days are coming, and they will be borderline insane.
By Chris Jones | Feb 1, 2006
HE FILLS THE WAITING MOSTLY WITH ROUTINE. Every night, like tonight, he returns to his shared dorm room at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs (where he's now spent seven of his twenty-three years), stretches out on his floor's thin carpet, and works on his skates. Having once been held in the hearts of millions, he seems surprisingly comfortable leading a life that's one part machinist, one part monk. First he finds his tool kit, a Tupperware bin filled with wrenches and stones, and next he takes out his skates, which are locked into a jig, blades up. The boots are hard plastic, burgundy and gray; the blades are seventeen inches long—as long as home plate is wide—and silver and gold, like his four-year-old medals. (They're in Seattle, by the way, in his father's new house, which, as it happens, sits on Olympic View Drive, overlooking the Olympic Mountains.) Everything in Apolo Ohno's life hangs on the sharpness and balance of these blades. They are his foundation.
They are also curved slightly to the left to help him grab the corners, but after this morning's practice session and another hundred laps, he felt as if they weren't quite right. By using a radius gauge that can detect flaws to the thousandth of an inch, he finds the wobble—a whisper, really, but plenty enough to keep him up at night. He works the kink with a tool called a bender, crimping the blade and measuring it again and again until the radius gauge tells him that all is right with his world. Then he locks his skates back in their jig and scrapes a square, flat, diamond-laced stone over the blades. He stops occasionally to pluck the metal with his fingertips, like a harpist working his strings, until he is satisfied with some invisible success. Finally, he runs another, smaller stone along the sides of the blades to shave off whatever microscopic burrs his earlier work produced. At last, they are perfect.
It's a little after nine o'clock. He packs up his skates now that they're ready for dawn, and he's ready for bed. In a few hours, he will rise and eat the same breakfast in the same cafeteria and skate the same laps until his blades are dull again, and then, back in his room, he will bend them and sharpen them and polish them, just as he's done every day that's passed since you last had his name on the tip of your tongue.
FOR SEVENTEEN DAYS in February 2002, Apolo Ohno occupied some portion of your brain's hippocampus; every time you flicked through the channels, there he was again. There he was, the short-track speed skater with Samson's hair and that big-toothed smile, reliving his Salt Lake City triumphs with Rosie and Jay and Katie and Conan, as if on a loop. But then, just in the way that winter turns into spring, Ohno faded for you. Someone you pulled so hard for, someone you lived and died with come every fall and push—suddenly he went on a too-short journey from a name to a face to a vague recollection, shoved out of your hippocampus by more immediate concerns and filed away in the almost oceanic depths of your cerebral cortex. For four long years, he's been hiding out there, waiting for another winter, waiting for Turin, waiting for you to remember him again.
Only one thing, in fact, has changed for Ohno, now that he's headed for Italy and a new round of torchlit fame. His coaches have started to pump the sound of a screaming, dyspeptic crowd through the arena loudspeakers in Colorado Springs, breaking the trance of his normally pin-drop-quiet morning practice. The arena looks empty, but it sounds full.
His coaches are doing this because we're not the only ones who might have forgotten.
It's hard for him to explain how exactly, but somewhere along the way Ohno lost the Olympics. Part of it was by design, because athletes are trained to think only of the future and never of the past, running their lives on rails. After each race in Salt Lake City—after each of the heats and quarters and semis; after that crash in the thousand-meter final when he dug his own skate blade into his thigh and, bleeding, stretched across the finish for silver; after he won the fifteen-hundred-meter gold following the controversial disqualification of a South Korean rival for getting a little physical; and especially after he was bumped from the five-hundred-meter podium for pushing a Japanese skater in the second-to-last turn—Ohno would disappear and bury himself in his work on his skates, erasing the memories along with the burrs. "I was so in the moment," he says. "When I'm in the zone like that, when I'm on fire . . ."
But another part of it was something else. Perhaps the Olympic experience is too big and too crazy for one man to take in. Ohno has a flash of looking into the crowd and seeing thousands of cheering fans wearing fake soul patches to match his then-famous facial hair, but then his memory pipeline snaps tight, and all that's left is a trickle of noise and color and sensation. Snapshots give way to impressions and feelings, in the way that he's become one of your million vague recollections. It's as if he went into shock until it was safe to come out again.
"I thought I was prepared for anything," he says. "But the truth is, there's no way you can prepare yourself for that kind of thing. I mean, I was nineteen years old. I was like, What's happening here? What's going on? I never once in my life thought that short track would become that big, or that I would become . . . I don't know what. Some kind of symbol, I guess. It was bizarre to be in the middle of that. It was borderline insanity."
The insanity lasted for a few more weeks. He did the talk-show rounds; he skated across the ice at New York's Rockefeller Center with Katie Couric and cameras in tow; somehow, he even found himself at Oscar after-parties, swept up in fame's red-carpet hysteria. "After- after parties," he says, shaking his head. "I'd be like, Is that Jennifer Love Hewitt? Is that the guy from the Backstreet Boys? I was like, What am I doing here?"
Soon enough, he wasn't there anymore. The monk in him began turning his mind toward returning to church. He weaned himself from the Hollywood life, first by confining it to weekends, and then by rarely leaving his room and the rink at all. But even if Ohno didn't choose to exit the stage, the return to semi-obscurity was probably inevitable, and this he understands. "You don't disappear completely," he says. "Going on a plane, a couple of people might recognize me. But after the Olympics, there's only one way to go. Things have to level off."
And, ultimately, return to a kind of workmanlike normal. Here, at the Olympic Training Center—propped up by the myth that a gold medal is the ticket to lifelong fame and fortune—that's a hard truth to convey. Ohno is the second-longest-tenured resident, the wise old man at twenty-three. (He's earned the right to dress up his room with a big-screen TV and a microwave and overstuffed leather chairs, the way lifer inmates turn their cells into palaces ten feet square.) But there are dozens of fresher-faced wrestlers, gymnasts, boxers, and cyclists here, working out in the pools and weight rooms, getting deep-tissue massages, watching what they eat down to the gram, and every last one of them believes that so long as they do this one thing perfectly, everything else in their lives will fall into place: There will be million-dollar endorsements and Wheaties boxes and everlasting love waiting for them as soon as they step off the podium. They believe their medals will double as passports to a kind of paradise, and it's only guys like Ohno who know better.
"I used to think that," he says. "We all did." Now he knows that whatever stewardship our Olympians might hold over us is almost always temporary. (When was the last time you thought of Kerri Strug?) He knows that one day, maybe as soon as this March, he'll have to quit speed skating and move out of his room and find a job that he can barely stand, and he knows, too, that there will come a day when he gets on a plane and no one gives him a second glance unless it's just because they like his big-toothed smile.
"I'm not set for life, that's for sure," he says. "This ain't the NBA." And as if on cue, his roommate flushes the toilet.
STILL, OHNO WAKES UP at half past six. He heads out to the fenced-in parking lot where he leaves his Lexus—one of the few tangible signs of his fleeting sponsorship success—and makes the short drive to the arena. While the Broadmoor Skating Club finishes up on the ice inside, the stands filled with bleary-eyed parents warming their hands on cups of hot chocolate, he stretches on a bench outside and starts his warm-up jog, leaning into the teeth of a strong Chinook wind.
He returns and gets dressed in the stands, which have emptied along with the ice. He puts on a Lycra body sock, his trademark headband, a helmet, gloves with plastic fingertips for running along the ice, and his skates. He joins about a dozen teammates as they slide blue pads out to line the boards for when they spill, and two large buckets of hot water are dragged to the center of the rink, waiting to fill in the circles they soon begin carving into the clean sheet.
Watching these skaters—which anyone could wander in and do, although this morning not one soul has decided to start his day in the company of Olympians—is an exercise in wonderment. For two-minute bursts, they go so fast, some of them have to wear goggles to keep their eyes from filling with tears, pushed along by the gentle, rhythmic click of their blades and, frankly, their enormous elephant asses. Most of these skaters, the men and the women, have thin, lean frames; from their waists up, they're built like children. But their bottom halves, Ohno's included, almost magically sprout some serious ghetto booty, bleeding into huge thighs that barely taper into massive calves that, all on their own, could have kept that cannibalistic Uruguayan rugby team sated for weeks. Really, they're physical freaks, predisposed since birth to tie on skates and race in tight circles around a rink. It's so clear watching him this morning that this is what Ohno, especially, was born to do.
And it's clear, too, that his enormous elephant ass, more than anything else, is why he came back here. Good thing for him, it has nothing to do with million-dollar endorsements and Wheaties boxes and everlasting love (although those would be nice). And it has nothing to do with the piped-in sound of a screaming, dyspeptic crowd (because no matter how hard his coaches try, they can't get him to remember hearing it anyway). That's not why he's spent eight years in his shared dorm room, and it's not why he wakes up every day at half past six, and it's not why he totes around an instrument that measures the flaws in his blades down to the thousandth of an inch.
He does it because he's one of the lucky ones in this life, having found something he's monstrous at. Unlike most of the rest of us, he wakes up each morning with the chance to be perfect. "There's not one day I don't want to be on the ice," he says, and that's because for two minutes at a time, he is as good as it gets.
"When you compare him to the other top skaters, they all have their strengths, obviously, but there's usually something that's limiting them in some way," says his coach, Derrick Campbell. "Apolo doesn't have that Achilles' heel. Out there, he's complete."
Out there, back on the ice, he is beautiful. He is smooth, machinelike, almost effortless; there's never a hitch in his stride or the hiccup of conscious thought. You'll remember that when you see him again this February. You'll remember his hair and that big-toothed smile. You'll remember how hard you pulled for him four years ago, and how you lived and died with him come every fall and push. Suddenly you'll lift him out of the almost oceanic depths of your cerebral cortex and back into your brain's hippocampus, and Apolo Ohno's name will once again be on the tip of your tongue. For seventeen more days, as if in a dream, everything will be just like it was. Everything will be silver and gold, like winter before it fades into spring.
