TURIN, ITALY — “Remember Nanny!”
U.S. speedskating coach Bart Schouten shouted at Chad Hedrick as he passed down the back stretch of Oval Lingotto Saturday afternoon.
Hedrick was 2 1/2 laps from a gold medal in the 2006 Olympic Games’ 5,000-meter event, but his lead was beginning to slip. So Schouten pushed Hedrick’s ultimate button.
“ Remember Nanny!” he shouted again.
Nanny was Hedrick’s late grandmother and best friend Geraldine Hedrick, who died 13 years ago Saturday after a painful battle with brain cancer. She already had weighed heavily on Hedrick on an emotional day in which the normally cocky Texan dissolved into a pre-race mess of tears, nerves and confusion.
Now Hedrick leaned into the curve, dug deep within himself and rode his grandmother’s memory home to the first American gold medal of the Turin Games.
“ She pushed me like she used to,” Hedrick said.
Hedrick’s 6-minute, 14.68-second triumph was also the first of a possible five golds the 28-year-old could win in these Games, which would equal the gold standard of Winter Olympic records — Eric Heiden’s five victories at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid.
“ You’re going to see my face a lot more,” Hedrick said afterward, back to his old self.
But he declined to say whether he considered the victory, less than three years after he came to the sport from inline skating, a case of one down, four to go.
“ That’s the famous question right now,” said Hedrick, who finished 1.72 seconds ahead of silver medalist Sven Kramer, 19, of the Netherlands. Italy’s Enrico Fabris was 3.57 seconds back to claim the bronze, the host nation’s first medal.
“ I’m taking it one race at a time, and I’m having the time of my life,” Hedrick said. “I’d really like to downplay the speculation of doing what Eric did. I’m going to come to the rink every day and have fun. And the more fun I have, the better I skate.”
Hedrick came to Oval Lingotto on Saturday expecting to skate with a heavy heart. Remember Nanny? Hedrick never forgot her. No one had ever been closer to Hedrick than Geraldine.
“ I always called her my best buddy,” Hedrick said.
“ His grandmother was his biggest supporter,” Paul Hedrick, Chad’s father said. “She was always there for him.”
She was there for him at age 5 when he flew through the windshield of the family car that had been hit by a drunken driver. Seventy-one stitches were needed to sew Hedrick’s face back together.
She was there when he began an inline skating career in which he won nine World all-around titles and 50 World Championships gold medals. And he was there when she finally succumbed at 68 to the illness that withered her to a shadow of Chad’s running buddy.
“ The last time I communicated with her I was holding her hand and I couldn’t even look at her it,” he recalled last week.
He planned to dedicate his victory to her but he was blindsided by his pre-race emotional meltdown. He ran a few laps around the arena’s infield, then headed to locker room.
In the stands Heiden, now a U.S. team doctor, introduced First Lady Laura Bush to Hedrick’s parents.
“ We’re George Bush people,” Paul Hedrick, wearing a wide-brimmed black cowboy hat, told Bush.
“ Well, we’re Chad Hedrick people,” Bush responded, adding that she and the president followed Hedrick in the Texas newspapers.
As he began stretching, Hedrick, whose confidence is renowned in skating circles, began feeling overwhelmed by doubts.
“ We’ve been here too long,” he said later. “You come here 12 days (before the competition) and now you start to think about things you don’t need to think about.
“ It was a battle before the race. All thoughts going through my head. I was thinking about things I’d never thought about, like, ‘Is my skate sharp enough?’ Just dumb stuff.”
By the time he reached Schouten in the hallway, he was sobbing and visibly shaking.
“ I was like ‘Whoa, what’s going on?’.“ Schouten recalled. “He didn’t understand why he was so emotional.
“ He just needed a hug. I gave him one.”
U.S. officials also called 2002 Olympic champion Derek Parra, perhaps Hedrick’s closest friend on the U.S. team. Parra lightened the mood, walking onto the scene and mocking Hedrick.
“ Oh, boo, hoo, hoo,” Parra whined before cracking up.
“ That’s what we needed,” Schouten said.
But two hours later Hedrick was in trouble again. Thirty-five Texans, wearing red T-shirts with “Chad Hedrick. The Exception” over a map of the Lone Star state, cheered him on amid a sea of orange-clad Dutch fans. Hedrick was 2.53 under Kramer’s time from an earlier heat when he began to tire.
As a young boy Hedrick could always hear Geraldine’s voice at his early inline races.
“ My grandma,” he said, “always pushed me to the next level.”
On a golden Saturday, she would again.
Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com
