Dan Jansen is not the only person to fall on the ice. People do it all the time. Crossing the street. On a frozen pond. Even on the perfectly planed surfaces of a world-class oval or rink. World champions and gold-medal favorites tumble as ignominiously as tots on double runners. Ask Brian Boitano of the U.S. and Kurt Browning of Canada. Or Germany's Gunda Niemann, the favorite in the women's 3,000-m race last week. One second she is in full stride, the next she is sliding on her derriere. Bye-bye, medal. Is anyone surprised that ice is meant to be slippery?
Certainly not Dan Jansen. He prefers it that way. The ice has been his friend and partner, providing him a surface upon which to set world records and achieve fame -- that is, out of the Olympic spotlight, on ovals in the Netherlands, Canada and Wisconsin. Beyond the land of the five-colored rings, he is recognized as a hero and the greatest sprinter on long blades of the past decade.
Jansen has a different persona, however, in Olympic competition. It was etched into the minds of fans on Valentine's Day in 1988 when his older sister Jane died of cancer. Later that day in Calgary, full of grief but nonetheless the gold-medal favorite in the 500 m, he fell. Millions of hearts cleared a place for Jansen that evening and kept him there after he fell again in the 1,000-m race.
Redemption did not come, as everyone hoped, in Albertville in 1992. When Jansen lost his balance in a turn and finished in fourth place in the 500, questions, quickly followed by opinions, took form. Eric Heiden never fell. Bonnie Blair doesn't fall (last week she won her fourth Olympic gold). Maybe Dan is jinxed, hexed, doomed. Then Jansen staggered home 26th in the 1,000. See. And so, simplemindedly, it came to be.
No matter that Jansen, like most everyone else, changed. His ebullient, cheerful wife Robin bore a daughter. They named her Jane after his sister. Jane was learning to crawl as daddy was lowering the 500 world record to less than 36 sec. in preparation for his final attempt to win an Olympic medal. Jansen told everyone who asked that he was at peace. It was apparent in his eyes, still soft but no longer sad.
The 500 was a lock for Jansen this time. You could take it to the bank. Except by now everyone knew that speed skaters can and do go down. That has been Dan's singular contribution to the common body of knowledge about his discipline. On Monday, 300 m into the race of his life, it began to happen again. Out went Jansen's hand to steady himself, the friction of it scraping along the ice probably enough to cause the thirty-five hundreths of a second's difference between gold and Jansen's eighth-place finish. "You lose so much momentum, it's hard to get the speed back," he said after he recovered his composure.
Jansen went back to his quarters that night, sat down and wrote the four words that he had been penning to himself for the past two years. The mantra, given to him by sports psychologist Jim Loehr, said, "I love the 1,000." Problem is, Jansen didn't. "I was afraid of it," he admitted.