Launch of Apolo

He defies the image of Olympic golden boy, but pack speed skater Apolo Ohno of the U.S. could become the Games' biggest star

By S.L. Price

Gerard Rancinan

Here he comes, breaking out of a slouch, cutting short a yawn, slicing step by icy step into his moment. Here he comes, the U.S. athlete most likely to leave Salt Lake City with a fistful of medals, skating too far back in the pack, his calm sending his coaches into profane exasperation: Move your ass to the front! Get up there! Can he make his move, find the gaps, slip the traps? Will he fall as he did once in a four-lap time trial, sliding on both elbows and one knee into a curve, only to pop back up in traffic and into the race? Will he go spinning into the wall? Here he comes, long hair strapped under his helmet, skates sprinkled with glitter. Are you ready to care?

Here comes 19-year-old Apolo Ohno, the name summing up divine talent and ungodly trouble. Here comes the next U.S. Olympic hero -- so long as he can avoid a repeat of his 1998 meltdown, so long as he can handle the Nike-sparked, IMG-fueled, NBC-oiled hype machine. Here he comes, leaning into a turn at 35 mph, dragging behind him a sport that few Americans know and fewer care about. He's no one's idea of a hibernal darling. The Winter Games have usually celebrated middle-class pastimes, Norman Rockwell-style. The athletes who have taken the grand prizes (endorsements, gold medals, a lifetime's hold on our affection) most often have been mainstreamers from the moneyed sports of figure skating, hockey and skiing; even long-track speed skating gods such as Eric Heiden, Bonnie Blair and Dan Jansen gave off that sweet Midwestern scent of white bread rising.

Now comes Ohno, a diamond stud in his ear, a whiff of scandal in his wake. He is a serious contender for four Winter Olympic gold medals, in the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 meters and the 5,000-meter relay. Never mind that his sport, short-track speed skating, has been in the Games only since 1992. It's an exhilarating spectacle, the Olympic equivalent of Roller Derby. No U.S. man has been better at negotiating the anarchy of the 111-meter oval than Ohno, who won two gold medals and a silver at the 2001 World Championships and finished first on last season's World Cup circuit. "When focused, he's pretty much unbeatable," says the Americans' short-track coach, Sue Ellis.

Focus, however, is Apolo's Achilles' heel. He tends to get distracted, but then, growing up, he had plenty of distractions. His father, Yuki, a Japanese hairdresser, raised Apolo alone in Seattle after Yuki's marriage to Apolo's mother, an American named Jerrie Lee, soured, and she dropped out of their lives. Apolo, a latchkey kid, fell in with a crowd of petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. He always burned, he says, with "this mad energy." He dropped out of an honors program in junior high school because his friends thought it was uncool. A former coach says Apolo once claimed that he'd faced gunfire, but Ohno denies that and now prefers to cloak his past in vagueness. He often ends sentences with the prevailing teen evasion, "Whatever." He shrugs when asked about the mother who left him when he was a year old; he knows little about her and professes to have no interest in learning more about her. His father will have it no other way. "There's no story about her," Yuki says. "No story. It's insignificant to what he is now. We've got to keep it that way."

		A typical short-track speed skater doesn't peak until age 24, but Ohno, the wunderkind of his sport, won his first U.S. title at 14.

Meanwhile, none of Apolo's official bios, and none of the stories written about him since 1997 -- when at 14 he became the youngest U.S. short-track champion -- mention that he has a half brother. When the subject is broached, Apolo pauses and then describes the brother as "about 10 years older" and no factor in his upbringing. Asked if the brother lives in Seattle, Apolo says, "I don't know. You're not going to get hold of him." Asked if he speaks with him, Apolo says, "Not at this point."

He says this while sitting in a cafeteria at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Ohno is but weeks from his dominating and controversial performance at the short-track trials in Salt Lake City in December and only months from taking the biggest sports stage the world offers. He's in the elite, and that alone is testament to his father's will and fear. "It was a mystery," Yuki says of fatherhood during his first years with Apolo. "I was incompetent. I didn't think I could pull this thing off."

Then again, it wasn't Yuki's first attempt at defying convention. In the early 1970s the 18-year-old Yuki, the son of a university vice president, rebelled against the Tokyo academic life in which he was raised, defying his parents and moving to the U.S. After failing as an accounting student, he drifted into hairdressing and studied at a Vidal Sassoon salon in London. He traveled all over Europe and to New York City to work the hair shows. In 1980 he opened his Seattle shop -- Yuki's Diffusions -- married Lee and figured his peripatetic life might slow.

He had no idea. He and Lee split in 1983 -- Yuki will not say why -- and they agreed, Yuki says, that little Apolo would be better off with a father who worked 12-hour days and had no relatives to help him. His fashionista pals drifted off. "Everything changed," Yuki says. "I had to change the diaper. I was completely out of the circle. Those people don't talk about kids."

Sometimes Apolo would be in day care; sometimes he'd be sitting in the back of the shop watching his father mousse and clip. Customers still remember the little boy in his Halloween costume as night came down, waiting impatiently for his dad to close so they could trick or treat. Yuki tried everything to keep Apolo occupied -- choir, swimming, roller skating -- but the kid was a handful. He'd climb over a fence at day care, eat rocks and dirt. At eight he began taking care of himself after school, coming and going at will. His junior high school was rife with fighting; boys, proud of their time in juvy, plotted to blow up the toilets. Apolo spent afternoons by himself or, worse, with guys nearing their 20s while he hadn't yet reached his teens.

By the time he was 13, Apolo would be gone from home on weekends, flopping at the houses of friends, staying up all night. Sports weren't helping. He had graduated from in-line skates to ice and the short-track scramble he'd discovered watching the 1994 Olympics on TV. He quickly won three age-group titles. Yuki drove him all over -- into Canada, out to Chicago, silently hoping success would be enough to keep Apolo out of trouble. It wasn't. He and Yuki often fought, Yuki threatening to send his son to military school. Yuki could sense those delinquents sucking Apolo into a wasted life. "And he didn't know how bad those guys really were," Apolo says. "One guy was in the newspaper every week for the houses and cars he robbed. People got shot, people got stabbed -- or went to jail."

In 1995 Patrick Wentland, then a development coach for speed skaters at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, saw Apolo racing in the junior national team trials in Saratoga Springs. Wentland was impressed by the boy's precocious strength, and Yuki, seeing the coach's interest, sprang. He asked Wentland to admit his son, then almost 14, to the center -- even though the minimum age was 15, even though Apolo would have to move 2,800 miles from home.

No one that young had ever been admitted, but Wentland, in talks with the USOC, campaigned hard for Apolo. He wouldn't have been so persistent had he known that the kid had no interest in coming. In June 1996, weeks after Apolo's 14th birthday, Yuki dropped him at the entrance to the Seattle airport. Apolo didn't make it past the first pay phone. "I made a call, and I was out," he says. "I had it all planned. Dad told me, 'I know what's best for you, you need to listen.' He comes from that Asian background; he's strict. But I'm 14, I don't want to do anything anybody says. So I had a friend pick me up. I was gone."

After a week's standoff -- with Apolo at a friend's house, Yuki fuming at home where he'd received phone calls in which Apolo refused to say where he was, and Wentland wondering what had happened to the kid he'd gambled on -- Yuki played his final card. He called his ex-wife's sister in Portland and implored her to come and talk sense into his son. Impressed by such obvious desperation, Apolo returned home. Getting him to Wentland was another matter. "I practically have to tie him with rope into the airplane seat," says Yuki, who went along on the flight this time. After they arrived in Lake Placid, Yuki startled Wentland by assuring him that Apolo would pull some stunt to get himself kicked out of the center. Yuki's final words to Wentland: "Good luck."

Apolo's first month at the center was a washout. He had little interest in training, and whenever Wentland led a five-mile run to the lake, Apolo would drop out of the pack with a buddy and head for Pizza Hut. "I hated it there," he says. "I didn't talk to anybody. I didn't want anybody to help me. Then I thought, I'm having a good time skating, my dad's not here bossing me around, I'm young and I can do whatever I want."

		After Apolo's trials meltdown in '98, Yuki took his shattered son to a cabin to be alone for eight days.

It didn't hurt that in August Wentland handed out the results of the group's body-fat test. Apolo -- or Chunky, as he had been nicknamed -- came in last. "That got him," says Wentland, who would go on to become U.S. national coach in 1999. "He came up to me and said, 'I don't want to be the fattest, I don't want to be the slowest, I want to be the best.' He totally changed. Every workout from then on, he had to win. I'd never seen that kind of turnaround so fast. Even now, at this level, if he decides one day that he's not feeling right, he won't skate well. But if he knows that he can win, I don't care if all the other skaters are having the best day of their lives, he'll beat them."

Such determination, combined with Apolo's gift for decoding a race's rapidly shifting patterns, seemed a recipe for instant greatness. In 1997 Apolo, not yet 15, won the U.S. championship, though in this sport the typical athlete peaks at 24. He seemed fated to make noise at the '98 Winter Games in Nagano. At home in Seattle, though, he still hung out with his old crowd of troublemakers and battled with Yuki, and the prospect of carrying the U.S. short-track team proved a crushing burden. Undertrained, overweight and exhausted, Apolo finished 16th in a field of 16 in the U.S. Olympic trials and left Lake Placid shattered. "I wasn't sure I'd ever see him again," Wentland says.

Yuki and Apolo flew back to Seattle together, but instead of going home they drove 2 1/2 hours west to a cabin Yuki rented on the Washington coast in an isolated spot called Iron Springs. "You think it over," Yuki said. "If speed skating is not what you want to do, I want to know." Then Yuki drove away, leaving Apolo for eight days with no television, no phone, no car -- only some provisions, the gray ocean, constant rain and his own angry, confused thoughts.

So Apolo began to run -- barefoot -- on the rocky beach or along a narrow highway nearby. A massive blister grew on the bottom of one foot, but he pushed on. One day, as the rain pounded him mercilessly, he stopped in his tracks on the beach. What am I doing? he asked himself. He realized that if he didn't want to end up like his friends in Seattle, he had to get more serious about his life and his skating career. With the rain still falling, he took a deep breath and began to run again.

The following year Ohno won the U.S. title. Since then he has only gotten better, becoming American speed skating's big hope. Although Heiden, Blair and Jansen drew lots of attention during their Olympic reigns, "we [the sport] never had the chance to cash in," says U.S. Speedskating president Fred Benjamin. "Heiden immediately went to medical school [after winning five Olympic golds in 1980]. Bonnie does a few things, but she's not going out there [enough]. Dan's doing his thing, mostly for his sister's charity. We need someone to be seen."

Indeed, competition from hockey and figure skating has only eroded the gains made by the big three of American speed skating. "It's a dying sport," Wentland says. "If Apolo scores big in Salt Lake and comes across as the personality he is, we finally have a shot to get noticed."

Which may well be a mixed blessing. At the U.S. trials in December, Ohno scored big and drew plenty of notice -- but for all the wrong reasons. About a week after totaling an SUV with teammate and best friend Shani Davis beside him, Ohno steamrolled the field with a performance so crushing that eyebrows rose only when he lost. After he breezed through the first seven races, winning the 500- and 1,500-meter finals, Ohno finished third in the competition's last race, the 1,000 -- a loss that, to competitors Tommy O'Hare and Ron Biondo, all too conveniently allowed Davis to win and claim the sixth and final spot on the Olympic team. O'Hare charged that Ohno and Rusty Smith had conspired to fix the race, and in the walk-up to the Games the sport found itself degenerating into a nasty stew of intrateam tension, Smith's defamation suit against O'Hare and an arbitration hearing that could well have ended with Ohno's being kicked off the team.

On Jan. 24, though, an arbitrator ruled that there was no evidence to support the charge. O'Hare withdrew his complaint, and Smith dropped his suit. Ohno insisted that he had backed off in the race only because he didn't want to risk injury, but reports that three skaters had testified to overhearing a fix being discussed and that the race's referee, Jim Chapin, had testified that he saw irregularities in the 1,000 were enough to create a cloud sure to follow Ohno to Salt Lake City. "I'm very pleased with the outcome," Ohno says. "I knew the truth would come out. I was concerned because I was losing training time and losing focus, but I'm definitely getting back on track."

Here, then, comes Apolo Ohno to a sport and a network in need. Here's a beacon of cool for the X Games crowd NBC is so desperate to attract, a winter darling unlike any other. The last time someone this edgy blew out of the Northwest into the Winter Games, she had her main rival kneecapped. If at a time of flag-waving earnestness, Ohno doesn't fit the old mold, that's just too bad.

"Skating as well as I am -- that's special," Apolo says. "To be able to come out of that mess as I did is special. To be able to improve my relations with my dad is special. I'm happy with the way my life's going, the way I'm growing up as a person. Skating has changed me. I've had a lot of chances, and this is my time to shine."

Yuki's, too. Even though the bond between father and son frayed, it never broke. Through it all -- every fight, every long separation -- Apolo made sure never to go too far. Through it all, he continued to let Yuki cut his hair. Dad packs his scissors for every competition.

"I always end up in the bathroom, doing his hair," Yuki says. "Lately he wants to grow it longer, but I still cut it off."

Issue date: February 4, 2002