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Sporting News, The, March 7, 1994 by Dave Kindred

Even after winning a record fifth gold medal, Bonnie Blair remains a reluctant legend

One noontime American speedskater Bonnie Blair looked across the athletes' dining room and saw Viktor Petrenko, the Russian figure skater. The sighting left her in awe, for here was little Bonnie Blair from the Illinois prairie and she stood in the same room with an Olympic here. "So far away," she later said of Petrenko, her voice soft and airy, "and yet he's so close."

Even after a decade on the ice has earned her five Olympic gold medals, Blair is the reluctant legend, hesitant to acknowledge her own place in the constellation of Olympic stars, brilliant as a Petrenko, eternal as an Eric Heiden. "I just don't think of myself in that way," she says.

It is left to others, then, to measure Bonnie Blair and no one at the Lillehammer Games did it better than the Chinese speedskater Yi Qiabo, who finished third in Blair's last Olympic race eve, the 1,000 meters. In delightful English and unhappy pain, Yi said, "It is not easy to get medal, even the third-place one. My knee, very great problem. My knee feel very pain, I am crying because I could not do my best. I am sorry for that."

But even as she wiped away tears, Yi was move to a smile by a journalist who asked if Yi, 28 years old, might try one more Olympics, those games of 1998 at Nagano, Japan. "Forget it," Yi said. "Not any more try. My body, my knee do not listen to me. I am done."

The she was asked Blair's performances. The Chinese woman didn't know what to say. She fell silent. At length she finally sighed and said, "I only wish I am get one gold."

If one gold medal is a wish, what do we make of five? "Being able to come away from the Olympic winning five golds and one bronze is something I definitely would have never dreamed of," Blair says.

That's one more gold than any American woman had won in the Olympics, summer or winter. With one gold medal at Calgary in 1988, two at Albertville in 1992 and two at Lillehammer, Blair passed diver Pat McCormack, swimmer Janet Evans and sprinter Evelyn Ashford. Only the speedskater Heiden, the hero of Lake Placid's 1980 Games, has won as many winter golds for the U.S.

"But it only took him one week," says Blair, laughing. "It took me six years."

Which is, in truth, no time at all. As Blair's teammate Chantal Bailey says, "She's like Carl Lewis. She keeps going out and winning golds. You know, it took Dan Jansen 10 years to win one gold medal. She's won five. That tells you how great an athlete she is."

The youngest of six children, Blair first stood on skates 27 years ago. She learned to race in Champaign, Ill., at a ramshackle ice rink open only two months of the year. She reached the Olympics at Sarajevo in 1984, a fresh-faced kid 19 years old, full of wonder and hopes.

And now at the advanced speedskating age of 29, Blair somehow has rediscovered the speed of her youth. Her 1,000-meter time of 1 minute, 18.74 seconds was her fastest since the 1988 Games at Calgary. She gives credit to Jansen, who won the men's 1,000 in world-record time.

She says, "What Dan did in his race, get to 600 meters extremely fast, definitely won the race for him. And I wanted to do the same thing." After doing 600 meters in a quick 46.9 seconds, Blair had only one thought: "Hold on for dear life that last lap." At the finish she told her coach, Nick Thometz,"I don't know if that's good enough, but that's all I had."

More than good enough, Blair finished 1.38 seconds ahead of the second-place skater, Anke Beier of Germany. "That shocked me," Blair says. It is the greatest woman's victory margin in an Olympics 1,000; the gap between Blair and second place was greater than that between the second-place finisher and the 16th.

Blair couldn't explain such an astonishment without at least a suggestion of awareness that she is an extraordinary athlete. In the two years between Albertville and Lillehammer, she had been good and consistent at the 500 and 1,000 -- but nothing special. She even allowed herself to wonder if this aging thing had something to do with it. "People were telling me I was too old already," she says.

But when they light a torch for the Olympics, Bonnie feels the heat. "The Olympics are very special," she says. "I might not always be at the top, but during the Olympic years I have been skating very well. I don't know if there is something about the Olympics that gets me going a little bit more.... I do know you can't count on anything when it's an Olympics because the Olympics is that much different."

Her first Olympic trip, to Sarajevo, was "an eye-opening experience. Just my two sisters and my mother went with me, not the Blair Bunch you saw here (maybe 60 relatives and friends decked out in Bonnie sweatshirts and golden ball caps). I got all choked up. I was in awe the whole time. I mean, I'd sit in the dining hall with Scott Hamilton and the Mahre brothers, Steve and Phil. My mouth would be on the ground. I'd sit five hours in the cafeteria, saying, |Hey, I'm here with them. This is just amazing.'"