Yanks On The Move

Bonnie Blair skates for blood. Not that she's a vicious person; she's as bubbly as a Bonnie ought to be. But inside lurks a tiger, and when Blair steps on the ice, she competes with single-minded ferocity. Nick Thometz, of the men's U.S. Olympic speed skating team, skates as smoothly and cleanly as water tumbles down a mountain stream. He wins because he knows he will. He is, in fact, the fastest sprinter in the world and Blair is the swiftest woman, and they're good news for the U.S., because an American hasn't won an Olympic medal of any color in speed skating since 1980. The last time was at Lake Placid, when a 21-year-old phenomenon named Eric Heiden scooped up gold in all five speed skating events and set a world record and five Olympic records. If everything goes as it should in Calgary, the dearth of medals will become an abundance.

"I have very few doubts Bonnie will win gold," says Mike Crowe, coach of the U.S. team. "She has a real shot at the 500 and the 1,000, and for something in the 1,500." So does Thometz, whose toughest rival may well be his own teammate. Dan Jansen, though Jansen is recovering from mononucleosis.

Last March, at a special records meet at the indoor 400-meter track in Heerenveen, the Netherlands, Thometz skated to a 500-meter world record of 36.55 seconds—that's at a speed of more than 32 miles an hour. He also holds unofficial world marks—he set them last year at a meet in the Soviet Union—in the 500 (36.23) and the 1,000 (1:12.05). At the same Heerenveen meet, Blair set the women's world record of 39.43 in the 500 to the tune of "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," sung by 16,000 ecstatic Dutch fans.

How is it that speed skating—never wildly popular in the U.S.—has produced such a pair? According to Crowe, who has coached Blair, 23, and Thometz, 24, since 1982, part of the answer is that they grew up competing in American pack-style racing rather than the Olympic—or metric—style, in which skaters race in pairs against the clock. In pack style, six or so contestants start together and jockey for position until the last lap, when they go all out for the finish. "The American system develops sprinters," says Crowe.

The other reason Blair and Thometz are so fast lies, of course, in their own personal drives. They share a number of common influences and traits. Both are the youngest of six children in Catholic families. All the children in their families skated, and they were raised in towns where youngsters spend their winters on rink ice and frozen lakes.

Blair grew up in a home where skating was a passion. "A couple of my brothers and sisters got figure skates for Christmas one year, and all they ever wanted to do was go fast." she says. A speed skating coach spotted the children at a public rink and invited them to compete in racing meets. By the time the family moved to Champaign, Ill., shortly after Bonnie was born, her five siblings were avid speed skaters, and she simply joined the pack.

A close-knit family, the Blairs drove to a different city every weekend for skating meets. Charles Blair, now a retired civil engineer, sharpened skate blades at the meets and timed races. While her brothers and sisters competed, Bonnie would sometimes fall asleep in her mother's lap in the bleachers. She usually won her own peewee heats easily while waving gaily to the crowd.

"Bonnie was a peewee forever," says her mother, Eleanor, "But when she was finally old enough to compete and have it count, she was up against [Olympians] Beth Heiden and Sarah Doctor." When many of her peers had already gone on to metric racing, Blair stuck with pack-style because that's what they skated at the Champaign rink. In December 1979, when she was 16, she entered her first metric race, a qualifying meet for the 1980 Olympic trials at the outdoor track in Milwaukee, at the time one of only two refrigerated 400-meter tracks in the country (the other was at Lake Placid).

Blair arrived to find that she was seeded last and, worse, that her racing partner had scratched. Sick with fear, she stepped on the ice alone and waited for the gun.

Qualifying time for the trials was 47 seconds for the 500, and as she came around the second curve. Blair saw the number 42 on the digital clock. With about 50 meters to go, she put her head down and in a burst finished in 46.5. "I just started to cry," she recalls. "Here were all these people who had worked years to qualify, and I do it the first time I get on a track."