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Some come up winners in biggest game — life
By Jay Evensen
Deseret News editorial page editor
Skate fast, turn left. Don't bobble. Keep your shoulders parallel with the ice.
Long-track speedskating really is a simple sport, even tedious at times. Go around and around in a big circle, and the fastest person wins.
It's like life in many ways. The little, tedious things are the ones that count.
If the Winter Olympics leave us with anything, it will be the lessons of life, the ways to deal with goals, dreams and shattered hopes. Because, despite the many winners we are watching every day and night, the overwhelming majority of athletes here will not win.
Be careful with the wording here. They will not win, but they won't necessarily lose.
On a sunny afternoon last Monday, Canada's Jeremy Wotherspoon came face to face with his goal, and he fell. Years of hard work, of perfecting the little things through tedious effort, vanished in a second like the flash of a firecracker.
Skate fast, turn left. Don't bobble.
None of that matters when the toe of your left skate catches the ice on your fifth step from the start of the 500-meter race and you fall to the ice. Wotherspoon hadn't slipped at the start of a race in four years, and even then it was a little stagger. He set his hand down on the ice to steady himself and kept going.
But now, when it counted most, when the world was watching, he fell. And yet, a day later he was smiling again, talking with reporters about it.
Wotherspoon said he remembers skating in "mass skates" in Canada, where if you fell down you simply got up and kept going. Then he recalled his Olympic fall. "The first thing I did, I sort of got up and then I thought, 'What's the point?' "
That drew a few smiles from reporters. But one could just as easily have asked him what the point was when he took the ice again on Tuesday and skated the second 500 meter race, even though his earlier fall meant he could have stuck a jet pack on his back and still had absolutely zero chance of winning a medal.
"I don't really think about it," he said about the fall. "It's part of my mental preparation. I think about what's next."
Skate fast, turn left. Do it again and again.
I have been around speedskaters for about 15 months now, preparing to write about the things they do at these Winter Games. It started as a nice diversion to talking with politicians and contemplating grand visions of the world and how it should be. But it didn't take long to learn the greater lessons.
I watched them freeze one afternoon as they made their way around a frigid outdoor oval in Butte, Mont., in their skin-tight suits. It was the National Single-Distance Championship, and yet the only spectators were a handful of parents who had scraped enough snow off a small, Little League-size set of bleachers to sit and watch. Conditions were miserable, and yet they continued going around and around, practicing when they weren't competing, like people with a strange compulsive disorder. They have no dreams of wealth like Shaquille O'Neal. They do it for the love of doing it.
But the drudgery of training holds huge lessons for those of us willing to take the time to see. We may not have to skate fast and turn left, again and again, but we do have to wake up, go to work, come home, tend the children, put everyone to bed and start it all over again the next day. We do it with little fanfare. Sometimes we stumble and fall. We make mistakes.
Perhaps there are no Olympic Games where our drudgery pays off, but it does pay off if done well —in satisfying careers, in raising children who become caring, responsible adults and in dozens of other ways.
Go fast, turn left. Don't bobble. Do it all again and again.
A handful of young men and women have shown me there is grace, dignity — even ultimate victory — in getting the routine things down to perfection.
Oh yes, there is one more part to this story. After Wotherspoon fell, the way was paved for his best friend, U.S. skater Casey FitzRandolph, to win the gold. What did he think about that?
"I hope he has his best race yet," he said, and he looked like he really meant it.
In an age when athletics has become synonymous with petulance and bad form, speedskaters have shown me there is hope, indeed.
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com
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February 17, 2002
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