Davis beats Hedrick head to head. link Hedrick wins bronze in 1,500-meter race Associated Press TURIN, Italy — Skating in front of a rabid home crowd, Enrico Fabris of Italy won the gold medal in men's 1,500-meter speedskating today, dropping American rivals Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick to silver and bronze. Fabris posted a time of 1 minute, 45.97 seconds, then waited anxiously to see if any of the remaining four pairs could better him on the slow ice. Davis went in the final pair, knowing full well the time he had to beat. He finished in 1:46.13. Hedrick skated in the next-to-last pair, covering 3 3/4 laps in 1:46.22, going much slower on his last lap than Fabris. The Texan knew he wasn't going to win when he crossed the line, shaking his head. The Italian broke up the American hold on gold medals at these games, becoming the first non-U.S. skater to win one in an individual race. It was Fabris' second gold, having helped the Italians win the team pursuit. Americans Joey Cheek and Derek Parra, the defending Olympic champion, were ninth and 19th.
Davis didn't compete in a team speed-skating event because he wanted to have fresh legs for the 1000m race Hedrick gets pissed because the US didn't win and blames it on Davis "not being a good teammate" Davis wins gold in 1000m, Hedrick still whines
Davis didn't want to race the relay with American team, thereby hurting their chances severely. Thing is, If I understand correctly, he said he never promised to race the relay.
But he didn't tell them that he wasn't racing until a few days before the event, and he'd had since November.. It's not just Hendrick that's pissed at Davis, it's basically the entire US Speedskating team. Outside the Lines had a good report on this last night.
BTW, why the frack is YAHOO posting the results on their front page?! Way to ruin it for people who might want to watch it. Stoopid Bastards.
On Mike and Mike this morning they were talking about this feud starting before the Olypmics. He doesn't work out with the others and his mother has made some accusations of racism. That's about all I know. Not enough to make an intelligent decision on who's right or wrong.
Sorry, but I have to side with Hedrick on this one. If Davis could have helped the U.S in the team event then he should have skated. The spirit of the olympics is not about individual accolades. It was selfish on his part and he deserves to be called out for it.
sfgate.com Turin, Italy -- So this is how the most selfish American Olympian sounds after winning a gold medal. He rattles off a teammate's accomplishments over the last year, cites one of the teammate's split times from memory and then turns poetic about the guy. "He's like mercury. He just rises,'' Shani Davis said of Joey Cheek, the silver medalist, seated to his left. Clearly, this was an impostor. The Shani Davis we've heard so much about doesn't blow kisses to fellow Americans. He doesn't even race with them. He races against them. He allegedly bailed out of the team pursuit, a three-person race added to the Olympics this year, and cost Chad Hedrick a shot at tying Eric Heiden's record of five speedskating gold medals in a single Olympics. There are two problems with those allegations. One, Davis was never formally part of the team pursuit. He says U.S. speedskating officials asked him to do the race only a week in advance, which didn't give him enough time to adjust to the idea. Two, Davis always intended to block Hedrick's minuscule chance for five golds. He planned to win the 1,000-meter race, also on the Texan's agenda. Davis could have skated as many as 12,800 yards extra if he had done the team event and the U.S. reached the finals. Instead, the Americans lost in the quarterfinals, and Davis, on fresh legs, won the 1,000. In the days in between, he was called unpatriotic, selfish and worse. On his Web site, one poster applied a racial epithet to Davis, the first black man on the U.S. speedskating team. Davis had a lot of answers, most of them sensible, some of them charming. But two competitors offered a more potent defense. "He's an Olympic champion, so he's right,'' said Erben Wennemars, the Dutchman who won the bronze medal. "Shani skated fast today. That's all I'll say,'' said Hedrick, who took sixth in the 1,000, finishing 56 one-hundredths of a second behind his nemesis. In the decorum category, he trailed Davis by much, much more. Asked whether he was happy for his teammates, Hedrick skipped right over the gold medalist. "I'm happy for Joey,'' he said. He also said: "I came here to be part of a team,'' implicitly denigrating a teammate. On the whole, this feud is like a divorce. Taking sides seems foolish. No one outside the speedskating world can really know how these two behave when the microphones and notepads vanish. But an athlete's conduct on the Olympic stage means something, and in that respect, Davis made the most remarkable comeback of the 2006 Winter Games. He said he had chosen to skip the team race not simply because he wanted to protect himself for the 1,000 two days later. Because he qualified for three individual events, he said, he didn't feel right shoving aside the skaters who were chosen specifically for the pursuit. (Davis was not.) Davis went to Salt Lake City as the No. 6 short-track competitor and didn't get to race. "I'll say this 100 times,'' he said. "... After 2002, when I went to the Olympics but didn't get to skate, I told myself that I would never, ever take someone else's opportunity to skate at an Olympic Games.'' As for Hedrick, he said: "At least he said I skated fast. That's nice.'' After his win, Davis took a victory lap around the oval with Wennemars, who is such an idol to Davis that he taped a picture of the Dutchman to his refrigerator. They joined hands and held arms aloft as they passed the two end zones, where the speedskating fanatics from the Netherlands, dressed in traffic-cone orange, gave them a roaring ovation. For a while, it appeared that Davis' celebration would include no one from the U.S. team. He slapped a lot of hands along the oval victory lap, and he clung to his good-luck teddy bear. Just as he was finishing, he spotted Cheek in the infield and went in to congratulate him. "Joey gave me one of the biggest hugs,'' he said, "almost as big as the one my mama gave me.'' Cheek and the other U.S. skaters are the children of this divorce, caught in the middle. They've been asked to explain the sport's ethics to a media horde that knows very little about what they do. "It's an individual sport,'' Casey FitzRandolph said, and I think that's the mind-set we all have.'' Of course, as Wennemars said, among athletes, winning tends to make someone right. Other than Hedrick's remarks, Davis faced only a few more harsh words. They came from his Dutch hero. "Shani,'' Wennemars said, "leave the bear at home.'' sfgate.com
Sorry, but I have to disagree with you. The "spirit of the Olympics" as you put it, is dead as a doorknob, killed by greed. The athletes who participate in the Olympics nowadays are basically professionals, not the amateurs they were 30+ years ago. If this occurred in 1976, I would agree with Davis being called out on it, but times have changed so much since then that I think Davis did what many of us would do in his situation....look out for #1. Unfortunately, that's the way it is in the world these days, for better or worse.
How can the spirit of the Olympics not be about individual accolades when individual events are included?
The problem wasn't just this event. Davis has a history of basically not associating with the team. Even their coaches, Dan Jensen and Eric Heiden, (who are two of the most respected speed skaters in the world) called out Davis and said that he wasn't a team player. The whole American speedskating team has always had some issues with Davis. It's just that Hedrick, who's hypercompetitive to the max, went nuts and blew up on Davis for "ruining his chances." Although, I sympathize less with Hedrick considering Davis has been flaky for a while now and it really makes little sense to count on him for anything. Basically two massive egos collided and major fireworks resulted. His mom has Jackie Christie syndrome and won't let her son near anyone. She runs the whole show and basically isolates him from everyone. As a result, the poor kid really doesn't have a say in anything and has been ostracized from his team. Personally, I dont care for either individual. Both have their own issues to deal with. However, I was hoping that Joey Cheek or Derek Parra (or both) would top both of them but sadly that didnt happen.
Both Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick are selfish, spoiled athletes. They are a poor representative of the United States, and their behavior represents the current generations 'me,me,me' attitudes prevalent in society today. Their bickering does not generate any positive impressions about Americans to the rest of the world. I agree with Michael Smith on Around The Horn when he said this kind of behavior may have been tolerable in the past Olympics if one of the two were from the old Soviet Union or East Germany against an American since they were our enemies, but since both of them are American's, this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Like the previous poster on this topic, I want to see the amateurs come back to all of the future Olympics.
Chad (whatever his name is) the next Eric Heiden? pfffft The problem with today's athlete is, they talk too much and very rarely back it up.
