Turin – For the American with soul, it was a return to his race of Olympic glory. For Team Korea, it was back to the scene of the crime.
This time, though, Apolo Anton Ohno was the man who skated off with a glare. And a bleached-blond Korean, Ahn Hyun-Soo, fortified his role as short track’s golden boy, winning the 1,500-meter title Sunday night and striking some icy vengeance for his homeland.
Headed into the last lap of his semifinal race, needing just second place to jump into the event final, Ohno decided it was time to move around the heat leader, China’s Li Ye. But as he cranked his speed, Ohno’s hand knocked into Li’s skate, causing the soul-patched star to wobble forward, boot a lane marker and stray far outside.
By the time Ohno regained his push, the pack had zoomed by. He never recovered. His fourth-place finish in the semifinals shoved him out of medal contention, quieting rowdy Americans in the stands and dazing his U.S. teammates who watched rinkside.
“It’s hard, it’s really hard,” Ohno said. “I’m a human being. It hurts. I put a lot of dedication and time in this sport. To not even make that final to even be able to challenge those top skaters, it hurts.
“But at the same time there’s a lot of racing left, and I’m not going to drag my head.”
Slow-motion replays of his split-second slip likely will coat Olympic TV coverage until Ohno and the Koreans return to the ice Wednesday night. But to fully grasp his emotion, one has to spin the dial back four years.
At the Salt Lake Games, Ohno finished the 1,500-meter final second to South Korea’s Kim Dong-Sung. (Korea now fields a combined team.) A jubilant Kim snatched his country’s flag in preparation for a victory lap. That’s when the public-address announcer revealed the judges had disqualified Kim for using an illegal block on Ohno, a move that kept the American from passing, they ruled. It hasn’t been quiet on the ice since.
Ohno was awarded gold. The South Korean Olympic Committee hired a Salt Lake law firm and threatened to sue. The South Korean athletes talked about skipping the closing ceremony. The U.S. Olympic Committee was quickly slammed with 16,000 e-mails, many from South Koreans.
Ohno also won silver in Salt Lake, erupting as a momentary pop star with invites to late- night talk shows and Hollywood parties. Then he returned to his dorm room at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and pulled the shade on stardom. The only major changes he made in his life was to adopt a rigorous, new training routine and a strict diet to ensure his return to the podium in Turin.
The South Koreans, however, never forgot. Last October, when Ohno traveled to Seoul with the U.S. team to compete in World Cup races, an estimated 100 riot police stood guard as the skater arrived at Incheon International Airport.
After Ahn won gold Sunday, however, there was no hint of gloating in his postrace talk. He holds the world record in the 1,500 meters and was first overall in the 2005-06 World Cup. He simply missed Ohno’s presence.
“I was expecting one against the other (in the final), but there were other talented athletes, so I had to do what I did to win the competition,” Ahn said.
Further stoking the revenge, Korean Lee Ho-Suk won silver.
But Ohno’s U.S. teammate and girlfriend, Allison Baver, seemed shaken by his sudden defeat. She watched the event from behind the track pads, minutes before racing in the women’s 3,000-meter relay.
“It just breaks my heart,” Baver said. “Really upsetting for me to watch it. I felt his pain on that one, for sure.”
Baver spoke to Ohno for a few seconds after the 1,500. She and her American squad may have been lugging the weight of his loss into their race, suffering a couple of bad exchanges in the relay and failing to qualify for the event final.
“I really tried to get it together,” Baver said. “I didn’t get as good of a warm-up in, but I was OK.”
Ohno, smiling beneath his trademark blue bandana, said he had no gripes with the other racer’s tactics, no complaints with how the semifinal was officiated. He admitted deep disappointment. But he seemed to relish a new role that might help him in the three remaining events this week.
“There’s a lot of racing left. A lot of these guys have (tasted) success,” he said. “So maybe now I’m a little bit of an underdog.”
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
