Athlete Bios
Long-track speedskating
Davis not interested in chasing Heiden's medal count
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 | 10:10 AM ET
New York Times for CBC Sports
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American speedskater Shani Davis competes in the 1000 meter event during the U.S. Speedskating Championships at the Utah Olympic Oval on December 27, 2009. (Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)In 2006, Shani Davis became the first African-American to capture an individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics when he won the 1,000 meters in long-track speedskating, a feat that led him to be described as the Tiger Woods of the predominantly white sport.
Davis has drawn comparisons to Eric Heiden, who won five Olympic gold medals in 1980 and is considered America’s greatest speedskater.
Davis, 27, qualified for the 2010 United States Olympic team in five individual races, ranging from the 500 meters to the 10,000, and also agreed to be considered for the three-man team pursuit. In October, he dismissed the idea of trying to equal or surpass Heiden’s medal haul from the Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., explaining that he was not interested in watering down the potency of his skating by trying to skate in every event.
He said he was content to build his Olympic schedule in Vancouver around his two best races, the 1,000 and the 1,500, in which he took the silver in 2006 behind Italy’s Enrico Fabris.
Since the 2006 Olympics, Davis has been one of the most consistent and scintillating performers on the international stage. He successfully defended his world all-around title in 2006 and won world titles in the 1,000 and the 1,500 metres in 2007.
Davis successfully defended his 1,000-metre crown in 2008, and in 2009 he won the overall title at the world sprint championships, joining Heiden as the only men to win the world sprint and all-around titles in their careers.
Davis, who was born Aug. 13, 1982, grew up on the south side of Chicago. He was roller skating by the time he turned three, and switched to the ice when he was six and his mother, Cherie, a legal assistant, took him to the Evanston Speedskating Club.
In 1999, when Davis was 17, he was named to the national speedskating team after earning junior world championships berths on the United States short-track and long-track squads.
Three years later, Davis became the first African-American to qualify for the United States Olympic short-track team when he earned a berth as a relay alternate. He did not compete in the 2002 Salt Lake Games. In 2006, he set out to become the first American to qualify for the short-track and long-track teams in the same Olympics and missed a berth on the short-track team by one spot.
In Turin, he became embroiled in a controversy with his long-track teammate Chad Hedrick, who criticized Davis for not considering the team-pursuit event. Davis’s presence on the team probably would have transformed the Americans into gold-medal contenders, but Davis said he wanted to focus on the 1,000 metres. They have since repaired their rift.
Davis, a physical specimen at 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds, is an iconoclast. He trains under Kip Carpenter, a 2002 Olympic medallist, in West Allis, Wis., apart from the rest of the Salt Lake City-based national speedskating team. In 2005, he filed a sponsorship-related grievance against U.S. Speedskating. Two years later, an arbitrator ruled in Davis’s favour and he was awarded a training stipend of a little over $2,000.
