A clarification of some of the things I wrote yesterday:
(10-24-06:
I posted this "semi-retraction" when I was still concerned about the effect my writing might have on my life within the speedskating community. Looking back now, almost a year after the 2006 Olympic Trials, I'm free to say how much I despise people like Andy Gabel.)
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I realize that a lot of the things I wrote yesterday were quite harsh, and I’d like to explain some of the reasons why I said some of these things. Some apologies are in order, where I crossed over the line, and where I said some things about which I’m not fully informed.
This morning I had a very calm and professional conversation on the phone with Andy Gabel, and I appreciate the way that we were able to discuss the facts of the situation.
The first point that was disputed was whether or not Andy actually said the words, “Nobody cares about Eva Rodansky.” I heard this from Stephanie Lambert, who is my friend and agent, and when I heard it, I felt it was an inappropriate thing for a USS president to say about any one of his athletes. Andy insists that he did not say this, and that he has two witnesses who will tell me that he did not say it.
At this point, it becomes 3 people’s word against one, and I must weigh the evidence to determine who I am going to believe.
I’m told that the fact that Steph waited until the next morning to tell me what Andy allegedly said throws some doubt onto whether he said it. But, the day before, immediately following the conversation with Andy, Steph told several people – including my coach – what was said. The reason why she waited until the next day to tell me is that she was debating whether or not she wanted to tell me something that would upset me unnecessarily. In fact, it did upset me. I’m sure my coach didn’t want me to hear it, and even after I did, he won’t be happy that I took it personally and made such a big stink about it.
We all make mistakes, and I can understand from Andy’s point of view why he might have said this about me. After all, I’m only the 5th-place American woman in the sprints, and I finish about 30th in the world right now. I’m not marketable to sponsors, and as things stand right now, I don’t look like a contender for the Olympic podium. The media doesn’t know who I am, and the sponsors don’t ask about me. All these things are true.
I also have my reasons for believing that if Andy said this, it is only representative of the way US Speedskating has treated me for years. Andy said that under his leadership, things have been fairer than they have been in the past, and I must say that it wasn’t Andy Gabel who blackballed me back in 1995 – it was Bill Cushman in his term as USISA president.
Next, I will relate something that happened to me
last season which indicates that US Speedskating did not care about me as an athlete. To be absolutely clear, I will say that it happened
while US Speedskating was under the leadership of Andy Gabel, but I will admit that after this happened to me, I did not inform Andy of what happened.
The Overtraining “Experiment”In the spring of 2003, I began training with the US National Allround program. Early in the season, all the US Speedskating teams training in the Salt Lake City area gathered at TOSH for our annual mini-camp, at which we had seminars on nutrition, training, and sports psychology. While at this mini-camp, we were informed by the coaches that there would be a sports physiology intern collecting various training data on us, such as morning heart rate, training lactates, perceived exertion, and mental well-being.
We were told that there would be a group of respected USOC scientists (names such as Dr. Carl Foster were dropped at this point) who would be looking over our training data every few training cycles, and that our training programs would be adjusted based on these data to make sure that everyone was adapting properly to the training program. We were informed specifically that the purpose of all this was to make sure that our team performed well during the racing season. This scientific team was, quite appropriately, named the
Performance Enhancement Team.
Throughout the summer, I was exhausted and the data showed it. My morning heart rate was 15-20 beats per minute above normal for about 6 weeks in August-September. I asked to do my “aerobic” bike rides on my own since I couldn’t keep up with the group, but I wasn’t allowed, and instead, had to be motor-paced back to the group at my maximal heart rate when I fell behind because I was above anaerobic threshold. When I looked at the ice workouts, I thought somebody was adjusting things because it always said, “Eva does 12 laps,” while the other girls would do 15-20. But I was so far over the edge by that point that what I really needed was to lie flat on my back for 2 weeks.
By October it was apparent that my racing season would be disastrous, when I turned in my first 3000-meter time of 4:54 (!!!) I ended up not making a single World Cup that season for the first time since my comeback. Then, after taking the rest I needed, my performances started coming back to within range of my personal bests by late January – too late to save my season.
You might wonder, “How could she allow this to happen to herself if she is supposedly so smart?” It was
because we were told about the Performance Enhancement Team. I became convinced that I had a group of scientists looking out for my training and making sure that I didn’t fall off the edge.
People who really know me will say that I will never be the first one to say, “I can’t do this; I need to rest.” I knew my morning heart rate was indicating that I was doing too much, but I thought that it had a lot to do with the stress of combining work with training, so I kept pushing myself. But the most important reason was that I saw the Performance Enhancement Team as my safety net. I thought that somebody smarter than me was letting me know how much they thought I could handle. I thought that trusting these people would enable me to push beyond my limits and thereby improve my performance.
At the end of that season, we had another mini-camp. I knew that several other people who were on the Allround team with me had also become overtrained, and I was curious to find out what the coaches had to say about what happened. I thought that they’d say something like, “We didn’t have as many chances to meet with the Performance Enhancement Team as often as we would have liked,” or maybe, “If you guys are really feeling that bad and that tired, you need to speak up and let us know.”
I sure wasn’t prepared for what was actually said.
Tom Cushman got up in front of the group and said this: “Last season, half of my team did awesome, and the other half fell off the edge. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I remember a talk I once had with Finn Halvorsen, and we agreed that this is a better way for a training program to go, than to have the WHOLE team do ‘relatively well,’ but not have ANY truly spectacular performances. In the middle of the summer, we saw that some of you were getting overtrained, but we decided to keep pushing you in the interest of collecting data for the future.
The intent for this year was to collect a body of data on a whole group of people, rather than being concerned with individual results.”We were then told that we should be grateful that the data collected on us would be used for the benefit of future generations of speedskaters.
In my opinion, the way the plan for that season was described and then executed was misleading and damaging. It definitely demonstrated a lack of concern for the performance of certain athletes.
What is wrong with believing that, when you agree to participate in a National Team program for which you qualify, that your individual performance as a National Team athlete should matter, and that the coaches and scientists should help you achieve that? At the time when I entered the National Allround program, it was my goal to go from being a World Cup B Group skater to being a consistent A Group skater. What was wrong with my expectation that the US National Team would help me achieve this? Doesn’t our team earn an additional World Cup spot for each Top 20 skater at the end of the season? How were their goals contrary to my own?
My mom once warned me that even if I become a great athlete, all I will be is “somebody’s racehorse.” But even she never expected that I would become “somebody’s guinea pig.” At least if you’re a racehorse, YOUR TRAINERS CARE THAT YOU WIN.
This would be a good time to go into why I talked about the lack of education of American coaches. I’m sorry if I offended some people, but this ended up costing me a season. The reason why I said that this compares to “turning a Biology 101 class loose on human clinical trials” is that a Biology 101 lab class doesn’t collect new data – it merely does experiments that have been done before, in order to teach new people how to run experiments. What really turns the knife is that the data collected on my and 3 of my teammates’ destroyed seasons was already collected decades ago by the Russians.
The Russians did “overtraining attrition experiments” back in the 1970’s on teams of speedskaters, in order to see how much the human body could handle. The difference is that
THEIR EXPERIMENTAL TEAMS DID NOT CONSIST OF PEOPLE WHO HAD EARNED NATIONAL TEAM SPOTS. On the contrary, these sub-National Team athletes were told, “You didn’t make the team, but if you want to continue doing speedskating full-time, sign up for one of our experimental teams and you will be compensated for your time and effort in the interest of data collection.”
The effort I put into speedskating alone was too much to sacrifice on such misleading experiments. What wasn’t even taken into account was the hell I go through in order to fund my training by working an actual job in combination with the training. I care about this sport and my performance, and I expect results. All of my work was thrown away in the interest of collecting worthless data that will never be used to benefit me, and probably will never benefit anyone else.
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The Qwest deal, Athlete Agreement, and logo spots:
Let me re-word some of my opinions on the Qwest deal. Maybe it’s not so much that we did not get enough financial support from Qwest, but that we (US Speedskating) are not distributing the money in a way that everyone would agree with. Here are my opinions: I think we spend a lot of money on sports science that collects worthless data that has not been shown to help athletes perform better. (One exception to this is “Live High-Train Low,” which has been proven to work for many sports in addition to our own and is certainly not a waste.)
I also think that U.S. Speedskating is not as interested in “development” as they pretend to be. Speedskating has historically been a very small and insular sport, and a lot of people want to keep it that way. For example, the Inline skaters who are saving our sport right now (and who contributed significantly to our medal haul in 2002) were made to feel very unwelcome when they first showed up on the ice. How much has changed since the late 1990’s? And have we been able to capitalize on the popularity of athletes like Apolo Ohno to bring interest to our sport?
I am fully aware that I signed the Athlete Agreement, and that I agreed to give back the borrowed leg logo spot to US Speedskating if they found a sponsor to take that spot. I guess that I never expected that when USS found a sponsor worthy of that big logo spot, that skaters at my level would not see any benefit.
Because I literally have trouble coming up with money for my basic living expenses (food, housing, transportation, insurance…) I had hoped to sell my leg logo spot for $10,000 to a company that would give me this money so I could survive for a season without having to worry about working. (In other postings on my Blog, I went over how difficult it has been to work and train – especially with a job in my field.)
I feel that US Speedskating is not concerned with how difficult it is for an athlete at my level to survive and train. So many people get to this level, start feeling like they are pushing a wall they can’t break through, and then get frustrated and quit. I feel that US Speedskating is used to having rich parents giving their kids money so they can train, and that nothing needs to change. If the Qwest deal had included some help for athletes in my situation (such as an increase in performance-based monthly stipends), then I’d have felt a lot better about wearing the logos and not complaining.
The things I said about Andy:
I’ll admit that I took the most vicious gossip circulating in the speedskating world about Andy Gabel, and used it to attack him after hearing what he said about me. Also, I may not have heard the whole story about US Speedskating suing Chad Hedrick. When Chad came back from the Fall World Cups, he himself told me that US Speedskating was going to sue him for wearing other sponsor’s logos on his skinsuit during the Fall World Cup competitions.
But, you know what? I really do believe that one of the reasons why Andy Gabel has no idea what some of us speedskaters have to do in order to support ourselves financially is that his parents were fucking loaded and he was the one who was always driving the BMW to the training center. So, if he always had everything he needed and then some, then maybe he really is an underachieving loser for not winning a gold medal at the Olympics. All he needs to do now is to stop taking it out on the rest of us.
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Maybe I should have brought certain situations to the attention of US Speedskating immediately after they happened, instead of waiting for the frustration to boil over. I feel that there are things in US Speedskating that need to change, and sometimes I get upset when I feel there are unnecessary barriers in my way as I try to improve my speedskating performance.
To The Coaches:
I know you guys will be offended by some of the things I said yesterday. I feel betrayed by the overtraining fiasco last year – that you’d admit you saw us getting overtrained but chose to keep on pushing us. I was the only one of the 4 athletes who experienced this who left US Speedskating’s programs, and now it appears that I’m the only one who has come out and said anything about it.
There seems to be an attitude where athletes can have just about anything done to them, and then they are expected to forget about it and come to practice the next day with a smile, like nothing ever happened. It seems I care too deeply about this sport to be able to do that.
I can’t afford to lose a season; to lose world cup experience; to lose opportunities for sponsorship; to lose my monthly stipend and the chance to get a road bike. All of these are things I would have had if I had merely maintained the same level I had the previous season.
I feel like I’ve had to try really hard to justify that I am an athlete who is worth helping, and that with the right training, I will be able to perform. That’s why I talked about a coach from another country who had such a good opinion of my potential. I also believe that my performance so far this season has shown that I finally found a training program out there that works for me.
I hope that we can get past this. I do value the input of US Speedskating coaches. For example, Ryan Shimabukuro gave me some very helpful advice at the sprint World Cup in Calgary last weekend.
Maybe we should just sit down and have a beer and talk it out.
Unless, of course, “Nobody cares…etc.etc…” ha-ha, just kidding!!!
