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Blair wins races in the first 100 m, and she was .24 sec. ahead of Ye's pace when the edges of her blades bit into the first turn. On the backstretch, an army of Blair's supporters were in full cry as she passed. "I didn't hear them," she said. When she broke the electronic finish line, Blair was .18 sec. front of Ye and had the gold. Asked about the jockeying for position and the refusal of race officials to allow her a rerun, Ye blinked and graciously said, "It is a pity."
Ye's silver was the first winter medal for her country, and she had another chance for gold in the 1,000. As did Blair, who treated the intervening 1,500- m race as training, easing up for the last 400 m. In that race, German Jacqueline Boerner edged teammate Niemann for the gold, completing a comeback almost as dramatic as Ye's. While training on her bike outside Berlin in August 1990, Boerner was struck -- deliberately, she claims -- by a driver behind the wheel of a Trabant, the flimsiest vehicle on four wheels. "If it had been a real car, I wouldn't be here," she can now joke. But even Trabants are tougher than bikes, and Boerner broke an ankle and tore ligaments in her knee, which sent her to a hospital for months.
For Blair, her final race offered a chance to better Calgary, where she won a bronze in the 1,000. This time at the Albertville track, Bonnie skated first, posting a 1:21.9 for Ye to top. With no repeat of the jostling during the lane changeover, Ye surged toward the finish line and vindication. When she lifted her head to the scoreboard, the Chinese skater had certainly achieved that. But by the incomprehensibly slim margin of .02 sec., less than the blink of an eye, Blair had won a second gold medal, making her the first American woman to take home three gold medals from the Winter Games.
America's Dan Jansen had the most emotion-laden second chance at Albertville. On the morning of the 500-m race at Calgary, Jansen's older sister had died of leukemia. Favored to win, he had planned to dedicate the gold medal to her, but fell on the first turn. Later, in the 1,000 m, he fell again. Despair is too mild a word to describe the look on his face as he lifted himself from the ice. Four years later, a still introverted Jansen and his protective family assert that Calgary no longer haunts him. "There are other things in his life now," says his brother Michael. "He's married, and he's not as serious." Coming into the Albertville Games, Jansen was in the best shape of his life, buoyed by the enthusiasm and whipcracking of a new coach, Peter Mueller.