Post by stella on Apr 5, 2006 17:25:30 GMT -5
Cold Warrior
By Bill Donahue
Before lining up on the ice in Turin for the Winter Games, speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno had a score to settle. So he packed himself off to Seoul, South Korea, where he was Public Enemy Number One, to clear his name.
A hundred or so riot policemen stood at the Seoul airport last fall, waiting for him. They were all dressed alike, in powder-blue shirts with ropey white shoulder epaulets, black captains hats and shiny black shoes. Many of them stood with their arms ramrod stiff at their sides as they guarded a narrow pathway formed by two lines of red tape.
Eventually, a young man with long hair stepped out of the baggage claim area. It was him, maybe. It looked like him and the waiting press corps surged forward. One photographer crashed through the tape, stumbling and then continued to shoot even as he lay sprawled on the floor.
Wrong guy.
Finally, after a few minutes, Apolo Anton Ohno emerged.
Ohno, 23, is the world's third-ranked short-track speedskater. But that doesn't quite capture his status. Four years ago in Salt Lake City, Ohno became the first American male short-tracker ever to snare an Olympic gold medal, winning the 1,500-meter sprint and heroically salvaging a silver in the 1,000-meter final by slithering across the finish line on his side.
Overnight, Ohno became an icon of cool. Here was a rakish Japanese-American kid with flowing, jet-black hair and a soul patch who raced with a bandana knotted under his helmet. Rumors of his days running the streets of Seattle with teen hoodlums swirled about him. Elton John invited him to a house party and a fashion magazine featured him in a pictorial.
Meanwhile in South Korea, where speedskating is a national obsession, Ohno became the subject of a deep hatred. Perhaps you can recall why. In Ohno's Olympic gold-medal race, he trailed South Korean Dong-Sung Kim by inches as they flew through the last lap, their backs bent, their gloves grazing the ice. Ohno attempted to lunge past Kim on the inside but Kim kept the lead and crossed the line first. He grabbed a South Korean flag and floated victoriously around the rink. Then suddenly the judges announced that Kim had disqualified himself; he had "cross-tracked" Ohno, illegally blocking an attempted pass (see photos above).
In South Korea, Ohno's gesture of complaint- hands high, palms open, calling attention to the foul- was read as a desperate Hollywood attempt to snatch victory from defeat, an act of entitlement from an impudent whiner. Already, many young South Koreans detested the U.S. because, on their peninsula, we're still fighting the Cold War. More that 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed in and near Seoul, dedicated to chilling North Korea's Stalinesque dictator Kim Jong-Il, even as south Korea seeks rapprochement. The troops are reviled, and the victorious Apolo Ohno became an anti-U.S. scapegoat. In the days following his triumph in Salt Lake, Ohno received numerous death threats. Later, in a 2002 poll by South Korean magazine Vox, 174 out of 442 South Korean college students reportedly named Ohno the most unwelcome visitor, relegating Osama Bin Laden to a distant second place. When a World Cup skating meet was held in Chonju, South Korea, in 2003, Ohno stayed home. According to his father, he was concerned for his safety.
But as the police waited at the Seoul airport last fall, another three-day World Cup meet was slated to take place, and Ohno was in. In a decade of World cup skating, he had endured plenty of difficult experiences. He'd survived the 35-mile-per-hour dirty tricks of his sport- the shoving, the blocking, the elbowing- longer than almost any other skater on the circuit, and he was a three-time World Cup overall champion. Still, the way he won gold in 2002 left the question open as to whether he has the ruthlessness of truly dominant sports figures like Jordan or Gretsky or, for that matter, the South Korean speedskating team. Now he had a chance to remove all doubt: He would face down the death threats and the notoriously dirty team play of the South Koreans on their home ice.
So he picked up his two pairs of skates from baggage claim, then cut down the police-lined path through the tape. The reporters trailed him outside and an entourage gathered around an idling vehicle. A USOC security specialist had traveled here especially for Ohno, and two hulking and somber Korean security guards hovered around the skater as well. Ohno was worried. "All it'd take is one crazy person," he had told me earlier. However, he had discussed this Korea trip at length with his father. "Being an athlete," Yuki Ohno believes, "is just like being a soldier. To survive very brutal experiences is good for you."
Judging from his media image, I had expected Ohno to be loose-limbed and insouciant. In fact he is sober and unrelentingly methodical. For the past eight years, he has lived in a dorm room at the USOC Training Center in Colorado Springs. He's allowed himself one indulgence- a white Lexus LX 470 SUV that is ticked out with chrome rims, Pirelli Scorpion Zero tires, and Focal Utopia speakers replete with custom "Olympic Style" subwoofers. Mostly, though, he's been monastic. "It's not uncommon for Apolo to spend a whole weekend working on his equipment," says his girlfriend, U.S. short-track star, Allison Baver. "When he wants to buy something- right now it's a 1964 Cadillac de Ville- he will research to no end and wait for the perfect one."
When I met him for lunch a couple of days after his arrival in Seoul, Ohno took a full five minutes to study the menu. Then he turned to me attentively, with amiable aplomb, and began fielding questions.
What did he think of Korea's discontent with the U.S.?
"I don't think anything at all about that," he said. "I'm just an athlete."
What was he reading?
"Muhammad Ali's The Soul Of A Butterfly. It's very inspiring. I mean, he's Muhammad Ali. 'He will fall in four!' " Ohno decreed, echoing Ali. " 'He will fall in four!' "
Ohno told me that another idol for him is Lance Armstrong. Like the famously lean Lance. Ohno aims to attain a high "strength to weight" ratio. "I weigh 10 pounds less than last season," he told me, "and I can lift more."
How much did he weigh?
He refused to tell me.
"Okay," I said, "do you have any special rituals that you carry out before races?"
"No, but if I did, I probably wouldn't tell you," Ohno laughed.
He may not cop to secret rituals, but he clearly has an intensely practiced pre-competition windup. In Seoul, he zeroed in on his training with a steady and almost hermetic focus. One day after lunch I watched him do some extra drills solo, donning a waist harness and lashing himself to a light pole so he could lean against a taut rubber band and do quadriceps "push-ups." The exercise was routine for him, almost rote, but still he worked with such deliberate intention that he seemed, in gym shorts, like a Rodin statue come to life.
"Move your foot a little, like this," advised U.S. coach Li Yan, a one-time Chinese skater. Ohno did, and then continued to toil.
South Korea is arguably the premier short-track speedskating local in the world. Skaters began racing around frozen rice paddies here decades ago, and in 1992, when short track first became an Olympic sport, the South Koreans dominated, winning gold both in the men's relay and the 1,000-meter at the Games in Albertville. Today, most of Korea's best young skaters train in the Mokdong Ice Arena. There, in the dingy basement rink, beneath the glamorous upstairs World cup rink, you can see tight packs of crouched-over school children whaling about, the names of their grade schools printed on the shins of their skin suits, as their coaches yell out splits. There are hundreds of such children in Seoul, and they typically work out eight hours a day- four hours on ice,four hours off.
The South Korean men's team is rank number one and the men who've fared best in the four World Cups held this season- Hyun-Soo Ahn the world's top-ranked short-tracker , and Ho-Suk Lee, the world's second-ranked skater- train in Seoul.
Among American skaters, the South Koreans have a dark reputation. "Everyone keeps it on the ice, except the Koreans," says Baver, who will skate in Turin herself. "The Koreans are very emotional, very dramatic."
"Culturally," Ohno says, "they don't skate as individuals. They work as a team, blocking you, sandwiching you. It's illegal, but they've perfected it. Every time three Koreans are in a race, they'll team skate- it's a given."
Ohno wanted to tell his side of the 2002 story to the South Korean public. But the Korea Skating Union would not let him and when I met one day with a member of the Union's organizing committee, an older gentleman named Pyung-Lyul Kim, he was genially dismissive. "When he gets the gold medal," Lyul said in bemused and strained English, pinning an imaginary medal on his own chest, "then he is qualified to ask for the press conference. But now- why Ohno? Who is Ohno? He is only one person competing."
Yuki Ohno thinks that 19-year-old Ho-Suk Lee is particularly aggressive. Ohno's fans hold a deeper disdain for Ahn, though. It was Ahn who hooked his arm around Ohno, making him fall in the 1,000-meter crashfest at the 2002 Olympic finals. "That Ahn is dirty," says Yuki. "Dirty." Nevermind that the crash began when Ohno and a Chinese skater, Li Jiajun, started to tussle.
Americans also see Korean short-tracker Seung-Jae Lee as a key henchman. In March 2004, at the world championships in Sweden, Seung-Jae Lee collided with a Canadian skater, Jonathan Guilmette, causing Guilmette to fracture a vertebra. Officials gave Lee a dreaded "yellow card," eliminating him from the rest of the competition. Seung-Jae Lee, however, did not make the Korean Olympic team this year, so in the week leading up to the World Cup races, I'd been watching for his countrymen to get goonish.
I kept looking for hard evidence of their dastardly team skating. But the South Koreans never got three men together in a single event. So what I saw was Ahn and Ho-Suk Lee milling separately among other skaters in a race's early laps. They'd skate calmly, and then there'd be a certain explosion; Ahn hopping up slightly, changing gears, dancing past everyone else, his blades flashing. He wove through almost invisible gaps in the pack and he seemed impossibly light on his feet.
Finally one evening I convinced Pyung-Lyul to introduce me to top-ranked Hyun-Soo Ahn. We met Ahn in his hotel room, where he was sitting on his bed, typing a text message to his girlfriend. Ahn is 20 years old and a veteran of the 2002 Olympics. But at 5' 4" and 117 pounds, he's a slender reed of a person, and with his boyish mien and his bowl-like hair cut, he looks about 14. In Mokdong Ice Arena, whenever I saw him he waved, smiling, as he honored me with a quick, shallow bow. Now he described Ohno respectfully. "At first," he said, looking down at his phone, "I thought he didn't play in fairness. But then I learned that this"- he threw up one open palm- "is something skaters can do as a tactic. It's not cheating. Even though some Koreans have bad feelings about Apolo, the world is learning from him. He is a master."
Ahn's roommate, an ungainly kid with buck teeth and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, watched us silently- bewildered, it seemed, by the English words flying around him. Only later did I learn that it was Ho-Suk Lee, the world's second-ranked skater, whom Yuki considers one of the most aggressive of all the South Koreans.
Two days before the races began in Seoul, Ohno came down with a stomach virus, and on the first two days of the meet, he skated horribly. His father came from Tokyo, where he had been visiting relatives, to bring Apolo an herbal intestinal cleanser. Yuki brought an artistic flair to the rink. Yuki, who's 50, is a hair stylist who runs a trendy Seattle salon called Yuki's Diffusion. In the 50-degree chill of the arena, he wore an orange mesh Nike T-shirt, aqua Nike shorts, and a pair of indigo Nike batting gloves that he'd brought along purely for style reasons. "They're cool!" he explained.
Yuki is 5' 6" tall with a toned physique. He spent his days videotaping Apolo and fretting with an almost athletic rigor. He told me that when he was raising his son, "I had armies of parents against me. They all wanted him to play video games with their kids and come to parties until 3 A.M., and I said no. I just burst into their houses and said, 'He's coming home. He has training tomorrow.' " Apolo's mom vanished from his life when he was one, leaving his father, a Japanese immigrant, to raise Apolo alone. When Apolo was 12, Yuki shaped him into a state-champion swimmer. Later, he helped make his son the first-ever 14-year-old American World Cup short-track skater. As the stomach virus swept through the American's gathered in Seoul, Yuki said, "I can't afford to be sick. I gotta take care of my guy. My mental has completely shielded me from any kind of sickness."
As a teen, Apolo fought bitterly with Yuki. Now, though, he happily took his dad's medicine. "It's great to have him here," he said about his dad one night, waxing into a rare moment of reverie as we rode a van through the neon-bright streets of Seoul, "He's just my dad. He's always been there by my side." He said nothing more because, really, the truth was bigger than words: He had integrated his father's lesson of discipline. He'd grown up, more or less, and would let his performance speak for itself.
On the last day of the Seoul World Cup, Ohno arrived at the rink ashen-faced, having eaten nothing the night before. Warming up, he could taste trickles of vomit in his mouth. Still, he skated through four heats of the 1,000- not dazzling, but with enough proficiency to finish, each time, in the top two (of four skaters) and advance. Then, in the 1,000-meter final, he won. Some gentle boos rippled through the arena. Two teenage girls with a camera phone tittered, "He's so cute! He's so cute!" Then a few minutes later, in the 3,000-meter final, Ohno had a chance to redeem himself, to become the meet champion.
The 3,000 is unlike the other, briefer short-track races. Early on, it's painfully slow, with skaters dragging along at 15 or 16 seconds a lap, more than six seconds off sprinting speed. Anticipation wells, and in Seoul the crowd ebbed in and out of a chant: "Dae han min guk! Republic of Korea!" Ohno jockeyed for position along with Ahn, Lee, and three others. For a while, he rested his back, skating the straightaways with his hands on his knees. He was in fourth place.
Then, with eight laps to go, he got down to business: 11.0, 9.9, 9.3. On one turn, Ohno's hand flew into Ahn's back- a slight, but legal, shove. Ahn jostled the skater in front of him and everyone came flying onto the straightaway, still standing. With four laps to go, the whole pack was clumped now. Then somehow, in the mad final melee, three lesser skaters fell away. On the last turn before the bell lap, Ho-Suk Lee held first, then Ahn, then Ohno. Ohno passed them on the inside. He passed both of them at once. He passed them so quickly and so nimbly that eventually I would have to watch the DVD recording six times before I could believe that the pass actually happened.
He came down the last straightaway all along, and the crowd, resigned to his winning, bathed Ohno in a steady, even applause- an approval that was more polite than forgiving. Ohno was indeed a master, even as a scrim of tension remained, and now he widened the gap. His arms windmilled in perfect muscular rhythm. He came around the last turn- smooth, suddenly a full quarter-second ahead- and then he pumped his fist once, sharply, in triumph.
By Bill Donahue
Before lining up on the ice in Turin for the Winter Games, speedskater Apolo Anton Ohno had a score to settle. So he packed himself off to Seoul, South Korea, where he was Public Enemy Number One, to clear his name.
A hundred or so riot policemen stood at the Seoul airport last fall, waiting for him. They were all dressed alike, in powder-blue shirts with ropey white shoulder epaulets, black captains hats and shiny black shoes. Many of them stood with their arms ramrod stiff at their sides as they guarded a narrow pathway formed by two lines of red tape.
Eventually, a young man with long hair stepped out of the baggage claim area. It was him, maybe. It looked like him and the waiting press corps surged forward. One photographer crashed through the tape, stumbling and then continued to shoot even as he lay sprawled on the floor.
Wrong guy.
Finally, after a few minutes, Apolo Anton Ohno emerged.
Ohno, 23, is the world's third-ranked short-track speedskater. But that doesn't quite capture his status. Four years ago in Salt Lake City, Ohno became the first American male short-tracker ever to snare an Olympic gold medal, winning the 1,500-meter sprint and heroically salvaging a silver in the 1,000-meter final by slithering across the finish line on his side.
Overnight, Ohno became an icon of cool. Here was a rakish Japanese-American kid with flowing, jet-black hair and a soul patch who raced with a bandana knotted under his helmet. Rumors of his days running the streets of Seattle with teen hoodlums swirled about him. Elton John invited him to a house party and a fashion magazine featured him in a pictorial.
Meanwhile in South Korea, where speedskating is a national obsession, Ohno became the subject of a deep hatred. Perhaps you can recall why. In Ohno's Olympic gold-medal race, he trailed South Korean Dong-Sung Kim by inches as they flew through the last lap, their backs bent, their gloves grazing the ice. Ohno attempted to lunge past Kim on the inside but Kim kept the lead and crossed the line first. He grabbed a South Korean flag and floated victoriously around the rink. Then suddenly the judges announced that Kim had disqualified himself; he had "cross-tracked" Ohno, illegally blocking an attempted pass (see photos above).
In South Korea, Ohno's gesture of complaint- hands high, palms open, calling attention to the foul- was read as a desperate Hollywood attempt to snatch victory from defeat, an act of entitlement from an impudent whiner. Already, many young South Koreans detested the U.S. because, on their peninsula, we're still fighting the Cold War. More that 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed in and near Seoul, dedicated to chilling North Korea's Stalinesque dictator Kim Jong-Il, even as south Korea seeks rapprochement. The troops are reviled, and the victorious Apolo Ohno became an anti-U.S. scapegoat. In the days following his triumph in Salt Lake, Ohno received numerous death threats. Later, in a 2002 poll by South Korean magazine Vox, 174 out of 442 South Korean college students reportedly named Ohno the most unwelcome visitor, relegating Osama Bin Laden to a distant second place. When a World Cup skating meet was held in Chonju, South Korea, in 2003, Ohno stayed home. According to his father, he was concerned for his safety.
But as the police waited at the Seoul airport last fall, another three-day World Cup meet was slated to take place, and Ohno was in. In a decade of World cup skating, he had endured plenty of difficult experiences. He'd survived the 35-mile-per-hour dirty tricks of his sport- the shoving, the blocking, the elbowing- longer than almost any other skater on the circuit, and he was a three-time World Cup overall champion. Still, the way he won gold in 2002 left the question open as to whether he has the ruthlessness of truly dominant sports figures like Jordan or Gretsky or, for that matter, the South Korean speedskating team. Now he had a chance to remove all doubt: He would face down the death threats and the notoriously dirty team play of the South Koreans on their home ice.
So he picked up his two pairs of skates from baggage claim, then cut down the police-lined path through the tape. The reporters trailed him outside and an entourage gathered around an idling vehicle. A USOC security specialist had traveled here especially for Ohno, and two hulking and somber Korean security guards hovered around the skater as well. Ohno was worried. "All it'd take is one crazy person," he had told me earlier. However, he had discussed this Korea trip at length with his father. "Being an athlete," Yuki Ohno believes, "is just like being a soldier. To survive very brutal experiences is good for you."
Judging from his media image, I had expected Ohno to be loose-limbed and insouciant. In fact he is sober and unrelentingly methodical. For the past eight years, he has lived in a dorm room at the USOC Training Center in Colorado Springs. He's allowed himself one indulgence- a white Lexus LX 470 SUV that is ticked out with chrome rims, Pirelli Scorpion Zero tires, and Focal Utopia speakers replete with custom "Olympic Style" subwoofers. Mostly, though, he's been monastic. "It's not uncommon for Apolo to spend a whole weekend working on his equipment," says his girlfriend, U.S. short-track star, Allison Baver. "When he wants to buy something- right now it's a 1964 Cadillac de Ville- he will research to no end and wait for the perfect one."
When I met him for lunch a couple of days after his arrival in Seoul, Ohno took a full five minutes to study the menu. Then he turned to me attentively, with amiable aplomb, and began fielding questions.
What did he think of Korea's discontent with the U.S.?
"I don't think anything at all about that," he said. "I'm just an athlete."
What was he reading?
"Muhammad Ali's The Soul Of A Butterfly. It's very inspiring. I mean, he's Muhammad Ali. 'He will fall in four!' " Ohno decreed, echoing Ali. " 'He will fall in four!' "
Ohno told me that another idol for him is Lance Armstrong. Like the famously lean Lance. Ohno aims to attain a high "strength to weight" ratio. "I weigh 10 pounds less than last season," he told me, "and I can lift more."
How much did he weigh?
He refused to tell me.
"Okay," I said, "do you have any special rituals that you carry out before races?"
"No, but if I did, I probably wouldn't tell you," Ohno laughed.
He may not cop to secret rituals, but he clearly has an intensely practiced pre-competition windup. In Seoul, he zeroed in on his training with a steady and almost hermetic focus. One day after lunch I watched him do some extra drills solo, donning a waist harness and lashing himself to a light pole so he could lean against a taut rubber band and do quadriceps "push-ups." The exercise was routine for him, almost rote, but still he worked with such deliberate intention that he seemed, in gym shorts, like a Rodin statue come to life.
"Move your foot a little, like this," advised U.S. coach Li Yan, a one-time Chinese skater. Ohno did, and then continued to toil.
South Korea is arguably the premier short-track speedskating local in the world. Skaters began racing around frozen rice paddies here decades ago, and in 1992, when short track first became an Olympic sport, the South Koreans dominated, winning gold both in the men's relay and the 1,000-meter at the Games in Albertville. Today, most of Korea's best young skaters train in the Mokdong Ice Arena. There, in the dingy basement rink, beneath the glamorous upstairs World cup rink, you can see tight packs of crouched-over school children whaling about, the names of their grade schools printed on the shins of their skin suits, as their coaches yell out splits. There are hundreds of such children in Seoul, and they typically work out eight hours a day- four hours on ice,four hours off.
The South Korean men's team is rank number one and the men who've fared best in the four World Cups held this season- Hyun-Soo Ahn the world's top-ranked short-tracker , and Ho-Suk Lee, the world's second-ranked skater- train in Seoul.
Among American skaters, the South Koreans have a dark reputation. "Everyone keeps it on the ice, except the Koreans," says Baver, who will skate in Turin herself. "The Koreans are very emotional, very dramatic."
"Culturally," Ohno says, "they don't skate as individuals. They work as a team, blocking you, sandwiching you. It's illegal, but they've perfected it. Every time three Koreans are in a race, they'll team skate- it's a given."
Ohno wanted to tell his side of the 2002 story to the South Korean public. But the Korea Skating Union would not let him and when I met one day with a member of the Union's organizing committee, an older gentleman named Pyung-Lyul Kim, he was genially dismissive. "When he gets the gold medal," Lyul said in bemused and strained English, pinning an imaginary medal on his own chest, "then he is qualified to ask for the press conference. But now- why Ohno? Who is Ohno? He is only one person competing."
Yuki Ohno thinks that 19-year-old Ho-Suk Lee is particularly aggressive. Ohno's fans hold a deeper disdain for Ahn, though. It was Ahn who hooked his arm around Ohno, making him fall in the 1,000-meter crashfest at the 2002 Olympic finals. "That Ahn is dirty," says Yuki. "Dirty." Nevermind that the crash began when Ohno and a Chinese skater, Li Jiajun, started to tussle.
Americans also see Korean short-tracker Seung-Jae Lee as a key henchman. In March 2004, at the world championships in Sweden, Seung-Jae Lee collided with a Canadian skater, Jonathan Guilmette, causing Guilmette to fracture a vertebra. Officials gave Lee a dreaded "yellow card," eliminating him from the rest of the competition. Seung-Jae Lee, however, did not make the Korean Olympic team this year, so in the week leading up to the World Cup races, I'd been watching for his countrymen to get goonish.
I kept looking for hard evidence of their dastardly team skating. But the South Koreans never got three men together in a single event. So what I saw was Ahn and Ho-Suk Lee milling separately among other skaters in a race's early laps. They'd skate calmly, and then there'd be a certain explosion; Ahn hopping up slightly, changing gears, dancing past everyone else, his blades flashing. He wove through almost invisible gaps in the pack and he seemed impossibly light on his feet.
Finally one evening I convinced Pyung-Lyul to introduce me to top-ranked Hyun-Soo Ahn. We met Ahn in his hotel room, where he was sitting on his bed, typing a text message to his girlfriend. Ahn is 20 years old and a veteran of the 2002 Olympics. But at 5' 4" and 117 pounds, he's a slender reed of a person, and with his boyish mien and his bowl-like hair cut, he looks about 14. In Mokdong Ice Arena, whenever I saw him he waved, smiling, as he honored me with a quick, shallow bow. Now he described Ohno respectfully. "At first," he said, looking down at his phone, "I thought he didn't play in fairness. But then I learned that this"- he threw up one open palm- "is something skaters can do as a tactic. It's not cheating. Even though some Koreans have bad feelings about Apolo, the world is learning from him. He is a master."
Ahn's roommate, an ungainly kid with buck teeth and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, watched us silently- bewildered, it seemed, by the English words flying around him. Only later did I learn that it was Ho-Suk Lee, the world's second-ranked skater, whom Yuki considers one of the most aggressive of all the South Koreans.
Two days before the races began in Seoul, Ohno came down with a stomach virus, and on the first two days of the meet, he skated horribly. His father came from Tokyo, where he had been visiting relatives, to bring Apolo an herbal intestinal cleanser. Yuki brought an artistic flair to the rink. Yuki, who's 50, is a hair stylist who runs a trendy Seattle salon called Yuki's Diffusion. In the 50-degree chill of the arena, he wore an orange mesh Nike T-shirt, aqua Nike shorts, and a pair of indigo Nike batting gloves that he'd brought along purely for style reasons. "They're cool!" he explained.
Yuki is 5' 6" tall with a toned physique. He spent his days videotaping Apolo and fretting with an almost athletic rigor. He told me that when he was raising his son, "I had armies of parents against me. They all wanted him to play video games with their kids and come to parties until 3 A.M., and I said no. I just burst into their houses and said, 'He's coming home. He has training tomorrow.' " Apolo's mom vanished from his life when he was one, leaving his father, a Japanese immigrant, to raise Apolo alone. When Apolo was 12, Yuki shaped him into a state-champion swimmer. Later, he helped make his son the first-ever 14-year-old American World Cup short-track skater. As the stomach virus swept through the American's gathered in Seoul, Yuki said, "I can't afford to be sick. I gotta take care of my guy. My mental has completely shielded me from any kind of sickness."
As a teen, Apolo fought bitterly with Yuki. Now, though, he happily took his dad's medicine. "It's great to have him here," he said about his dad one night, waxing into a rare moment of reverie as we rode a van through the neon-bright streets of Seoul, "He's just my dad. He's always been there by my side." He said nothing more because, really, the truth was bigger than words: He had integrated his father's lesson of discipline. He'd grown up, more or less, and would let his performance speak for itself.
On the last day of the Seoul World Cup, Ohno arrived at the rink ashen-faced, having eaten nothing the night before. Warming up, he could taste trickles of vomit in his mouth. Still, he skated through four heats of the 1,000- not dazzling, but with enough proficiency to finish, each time, in the top two (of four skaters) and advance. Then, in the 1,000-meter final, he won. Some gentle boos rippled through the arena. Two teenage girls with a camera phone tittered, "He's so cute! He's so cute!" Then a few minutes later, in the 3,000-meter final, Ohno had a chance to redeem himself, to become the meet champion.
The 3,000 is unlike the other, briefer short-track races. Early on, it's painfully slow, with skaters dragging along at 15 or 16 seconds a lap, more than six seconds off sprinting speed. Anticipation wells, and in Seoul the crowd ebbed in and out of a chant: "Dae han min guk! Republic of Korea!" Ohno jockeyed for position along with Ahn, Lee, and three others. For a while, he rested his back, skating the straightaways with his hands on his knees. He was in fourth place.
Then, with eight laps to go, he got down to business: 11.0, 9.9, 9.3. On one turn, Ohno's hand flew into Ahn's back- a slight, but legal, shove. Ahn jostled the skater in front of him and everyone came flying onto the straightaway, still standing. With four laps to go, the whole pack was clumped now. Then somehow, in the mad final melee, three lesser skaters fell away. On the last turn before the bell lap, Ho-Suk Lee held first, then Ahn, then Ohno. Ohno passed them on the inside. He passed both of them at once. He passed them so quickly and so nimbly that eventually I would have to watch the DVD recording six times before I could believe that the pass actually happened.
He came down the last straightaway all along, and the crowd, resigned to his winning, bathed Ohno in a steady, even applause- an approval that was more polite than forgiving. Ohno was indeed a master, even as a scrim of tension remained, and now he widened the gap. His arms windmilled in perfect muscular rhythm. He came around the last turn- smooth, suddenly a full quarter-second ahead- and then he pumped his fist once, sharply, in triumph.
