A Summary of My Experiences in USSPEEDSKATING:
This is for all the new internet fans that the sport of speedskating has been getting since the 2006 Olympics, and also for anyone who is unfamiliar with the whole story of my speedskating career. I've decided to summarize the most important stories and post them here as a resource for you, so you don't have to dig through all those other posts I've randomly made over the past year and a half.
This is the story of the kind of speedskating career that should NEVER be allowed to happen TO ANY KID, EVER AGAIN. This is my story of how I tried as hard as I could to compete for the USA in speedskating in a federation that tried as hard as it could to get me to fail, to quit, and just to go away. Also important in the context of this story is the fact that my parents did not approve of my speedskating, and that, like many other American amateur athletes, I never had enough money to ensure a sustainable existence in my sport. This, along with the unpleasantness that resulted from my fights with USSPEEDSKATING, was the main reason why I had to retire after the 2006 Olympic Trials.
If you look at the performance of the American women's speedskating team in Torino, you will wonder what it was that the old leadership of USSPEEDSKATING felt was worth protecting from competition within the country. You will wonder why they tried to manipulate a pure sport and give unfair advantages to their favorites. You will wonder why they told the whole world that metric speedskating was "all about the clock," and then when it came to dealing with their own athletes, they forgot that the word "clock" has the letter "L" in it.
Now those bastards have all been fired, and I'm proud as hell of any role I might have played in that "Great Purge!" But anyway, here are the main points of my story.
Let me begin with a list of my best accomplishments in the sport:
-B Group Champion, World Cup Final, 1000 meters, Feb. 2005 (the time was 16th overall, A-group and B-Group combined.)
-World's Best Women's 10K skater, 2003-04 season.
-American Record, Women's 10K, 2005 (held for one week!)
-U.S. Single Distance Champion: 3000 meters, in 2001, 1500 meters, in 2002.
-World Cup Points Scorer in every distance from 500 to 5000 meters.
-Alberto Nicolodi Trophy, Allround Champion, Feb. 2004.
(As you can see, though I may not have been a star, I didn't exactly suck, either!)
By the end of the 2004-2005 season, I had managed to collect the opinions of several world class coaches on my real potential in this sport: A Russian national team coach, scientist, and program director, who had been involved with their program for decades and had produced several World Champions and Olympic Champions, said I was "great raw material with the right sort of competitive drive." A Norwegian national team coach said that if I were one of his skaters, he'd make me "fucking win." And a Dutch professional team coach went on about the great results I could achieve the following season, "if only USSPEEDSKATING stays out of her way..."
1. I started speedskating at age 11, in 1988, with the West Michigan Speedskating Club.
2. At age 15, National Team coach Mike Crowe picked me out as "a talented skater" and invited me to train with the team. My mom said I was too young and couldn't go. Later on in my career, Crowe would turn against me as I took a different path through the sport and had success with other coaches.
3. In 1994, I moved to Salt Lake City with a USS coach, who abandoned my team after only one month of training. I was alone in a strange city, finishing my senior year of high school and living with a host family. That year, I wrote a letter to USS, telling them what had happened. As a result, they branded me a "No-talent troublemaker." I quit speedskating and pursued my education.
4. In December of 1997, figuring I'd spent enough time away from speedskating and that people had forgotten who I was, I decided to skate some time trials in Milwaukee. The people running the races recognized my name as "the troublemaker," and kicked me off after one 500-meter race on a selectively enforced technicality. After that one race, I had to drive 300 miles back to Detroit, where I was living at the time. It was then that I knew I'd truly been blackballed within the sport. In all, I ended up spending 6 years away, between the ages of 18 and 24. For an athlete, these are prime years of training and competition, and they'd just been thrown away.
5. In January of 2001, I took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program I was doing, and made a comeback to speedskating, joining the Utah Olympic Oval's FAST Program. By October, I had made my first World Cup team.
6. I missed making the 2002 Olympic Team by 0.26 in the 3000 meters.
7. I was invited to train with the National Team and decided to take a spot on that team in the 2003-04 season, mostly because of financial advantages. While training with that team, I got overtrained and had the worst season of my career. At the end of the season, our coach, Tom Cushman, informed us that he had seen half of our team falling off the edge of overtraining but DECIDED TO CONTINUE PUSHING US IN THE INTEREST OF COLLECTING DATA ON OVERTRAINING. He said he was not concerned at all with our individual race results.
8. From that point on, I was determined to NEVER AGAIN train with a USSPEEDSKATING program. I began to work with a local Salt Lake City coach, Boris Leikin, and had my most successful season ever with him.
9. I started posting on The Protocol in November of 2004. By January of 2005, I was pissing people off, and even earned myself a phone call from the USS President.
10. After qualifying for one of my many World Cup Team spots, I was wrongfully kicked out of a catered dinner that was paid for by the USOC. This wasn't a one-time event I'm talking about. No, I'm talking about 3-4 nice meals per week, brought into the Oval in front of everyone, throughout the entire training and competition season, paid for by the USOC, who intended these meals to be for all skaters who had qualified to represent the USA in international competition. However, USSPEEDSKATING decided that the only people who got to eat this food would be those who chose to train with THEIR teams. If I had wanted to pursue it, I could have sued USSPEEDSKATING for denying this to me, but I didn't have the time or effort to waste.
11. Along with the other speedskaters on the team, I was subjected to then-President Andy Gabel's backdoor sponsorship deal with Qwest and became a "walking billboard" for this sponsor without getting any benefit from it.
12. I trained with Boris's team through the summer of 2005, and qualified for the Fall World Cups. Two weeks before the competitions began, I had a back injury, and was denied access to a USSPEEDSKATING trainer because I trained with a different coach and program. It didn't even matter that I was wearing all of the USS sponsor logos in competition. One of the last things former Program Director Mike Crowe did before he got the axe was to argue that it was absolutely right of USS to do this to me.
13. I missed making the 2006 Olympic Team by 0.08 in the 1000 meters but was next in line to be added to the team and could have been an alternate for at least 3 events. But even though USS had two more women's spots to give out, I retired from competition IMMEDIATELY following my last race at the Olympic Trials, BECAUSE I REFUSED TO SUBJECT MYSELF TO POLITICALLY CORRUPT DECISIONS, which I knew would happen. I forced my speedskating career to end ON THE ICE, NOT IN SOME FREAKING BOARDROOM!!!
In fact, I was right. USS added two men, but FAILED to add two women, and as a result, they did not have enough women to skate the 1500 meters at the Olympics in Torino.
14. At the USS Spring Board Meeting in April 2006, Gabel stepped down as President. Soon after, Marquard resigned as Executive Director, Crowe was fired from his position as Program Director, Cushman lost his job as National Allround Coach, and several other staff members were fired or resigned. This series of events is what I call "The Great Purge."
I believe that speedskating sites on the internet, such as the Yahoo Skatelist and athlete blogs, played a major role in the shakeup in USSPEEDSKATING. This shakeup has been long overdue, but it hasn't happened until now. I believe the internet sites forced certain issues that USS tried to cover up out into the open, and forced the corrupt former leaders of the federation to be accountable for their actions.
The one thing I'd like to say to the parents of skaters who have just reached or are close to reaching the elite level in this sport is that the USSPEEDSKATING system that has fallen apart since the end of the 2006 Olympic season IS NOT the sports system that you expected when you and your child began your journey through the sport of speedskating. However, even though things will not be easy for you in the near future, you now have the opportunity to help set up the kind of speedskating training and development system that you want and deserve.
I hope no kid ever has to have the kind of speedskating career that I did. I hope the new administration of USS will have more integrity and will be better for the athletes. Now, I'm going to get on with my life.
This is for all the new internet fans that the sport of speedskating has been getting since the 2006 Olympics, and also for anyone who is unfamiliar with the whole story of my speedskating career. I've decided to summarize the most important stories and post them here as a resource for you, so you don't have to dig through all those other posts I've randomly made over the past year and a half.
This is the story of the kind of speedskating career that should NEVER be allowed to happen TO ANY KID, EVER AGAIN. This is my story of how I tried as hard as I could to compete for the USA in speedskating in a federation that tried as hard as it could to get me to fail, to quit, and just to go away. Also important in the context of this story is the fact that my parents did not approve of my speedskating, and that, like many other American amateur athletes, I never had enough money to ensure a sustainable existence in my sport. This, along with the unpleasantness that resulted from my fights with USSPEEDSKATING, was the main reason why I had to retire after the 2006 Olympic Trials.
If you look at the performance of the American women's speedskating team in Torino, you will wonder what it was that the old leadership of USSPEEDSKATING felt was worth protecting from competition within the country. You will wonder why they tried to manipulate a pure sport and give unfair advantages to their favorites. You will wonder why they told the whole world that metric speedskating was "all about the clock," and then when it came to dealing with their own athletes, they forgot that the word "clock" has the letter "L" in it.
Now those bastards have all been fired, and I'm proud as hell of any role I might have played in that "Great Purge!" But anyway, here are the main points of my story.
Let me begin with a list of my best accomplishments in the sport:
-B Group Champion, World Cup Final, 1000 meters, Feb. 2005 (the time was 16th overall, A-group and B-Group combined.)
-World's Best Women's 10K skater, 2003-04 season.
-American Record, Women's 10K, 2005 (held for one week!)
-U.S. Single Distance Champion: 3000 meters, in 2001, 1500 meters, in 2002.
-World Cup Points Scorer in every distance from 500 to 5000 meters.
-Alberto Nicolodi Trophy, Allround Champion, Feb. 2004.
(As you can see, though I may not have been a star, I didn't exactly suck, either!)
By the end of the 2004-2005 season, I had managed to collect the opinions of several world class coaches on my real potential in this sport: A Russian national team coach, scientist, and program director, who had been involved with their program for decades and had produced several World Champions and Olympic Champions, said I was "great raw material with the right sort of competitive drive." A Norwegian national team coach said that if I were one of his skaters, he'd make me "fucking win." And a Dutch professional team coach went on about the great results I could achieve the following season, "if only USSPEEDSKATING stays out of her way..."
1. I started speedskating at age 11, in 1988, with the West Michigan Speedskating Club.
2. At age 15, National Team coach Mike Crowe picked me out as "a talented skater" and invited me to train with the team. My mom said I was too young and couldn't go. Later on in my career, Crowe would turn against me as I took a different path through the sport and had success with other coaches.
3. In 1994, I moved to Salt Lake City with a USS coach, who abandoned my team after only one month of training. I was alone in a strange city, finishing my senior year of high school and living with a host family. That year, I wrote a letter to USS, telling them what had happened. As a result, they branded me a "No-talent troublemaker." I quit speedskating and pursued my education.
4. In December of 1997, figuring I'd spent enough time away from speedskating and that people had forgotten who I was, I decided to skate some time trials in Milwaukee. The people running the races recognized my name as "the troublemaker," and kicked me off after one 500-meter race on a selectively enforced technicality. After that one race, I had to drive 300 miles back to Detroit, where I was living at the time. It was then that I knew I'd truly been blackballed within the sport. In all, I ended up spending 6 years away, between the ages of 18 and 24. For an athlete, these are prime years of training and competition, and they'd just been thrown away.
5. In January of 2001, I took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program I was doing, and made a comeback to speedskating, joining the Utah Olympic Oval's FAST Program. By October, I had made my first World Cup team.
6. I missed making the 2002 Olympic Team by 0.26 in the 3000 meters.
7. I was invited to train with the National Team and decided to take a spot on that team in the 2003-04 season, mostly because of financial advantages. While training with that team, I got overtrained and had the worst season of my career. At the end of the season, our coach, Tom Cushman, informed us that he had seen half of our team falling off the edge of overtraining but DECIDED TO CONTINUE PUSHING US IN THE INTEREST OF COLLECTING DATA ON OVERTRAINING. He said he was not concerned at all with our individual race results.
8. From that point on, I was determined to NEVER AGAIN train with a USSPEEDSKATING program. I began to work with a local Salt Lake City coach, Boris Leikin, and had my most successful season ever with him.
9. I started posting on The Protocol in November of 2004. By January of 2005, I was pissing people off, and even earned myself a phone call from the USS President.
10. After qualifying for one of my many World Cup Team spots, I was wrongfully kicked out of a catered dinner that was paid for by the USOC. This wasn't a one-time event I'm talking about. No, I'm talking about 3-4 nice meals per week, brought into the Oval in front of everyone, throughout the entire training and competition season, paid for by the USOC, who intended these meals to be for all skaters who had qualified to represent the USA in international competition. However, USSPEEDSKATING decided that the only people who got to eat this food would be those who chose to train with THEIR teams. If I had wanted to pursue it, I could have sued USSPEEDSKATING for denying this to me, but I didn't have the time or effort to waste.
11. Along with the other speedskaters on the team, I was subjected to then-President Andy Gabel's backdoor sponsorship deal with Qwest and became a "walking billboard" for this sponsor without getting any benefit from it.
12. I trained with Boris's team through the summer of 2005, and qualified for the Fall World Cups. Two weeks before the competitions began, I had a back injury, and was denied access to a USSPEEDSKATING trainer because I trained with a different coach and program. It didn't even matter that I was wearing all of the USS sponsor logos in competition. One of the last things former Program Director Mike Crowe did before he got the axe was to argue that it was absolutely right of USS to do this to me.
13. I missed making the 2006 Olympic Team by 0.08 in the 1000 meters but was next in line to be added to the team and could have been an alternate for at least 3 events. But even though USS had two more women's spots to give out, I retired from competition IMMEDIATELY following my last race at the Olympic Trials, BECAUSE I REFUSED TO SUBJECT MYSELF TO POLITICALLY CORRUPT DECISIONS, which I knew would happen. I forced my speedskating career to end ON THE ICE, NOT IN SOME FREAKING BOARDROOM!!!
In fact, I was right. USS added two men, but FAILED to add two women, and as a result, they did not have enough women to skate the 1500 meters at the Olympics in Torino.
14. At the USS Spring Board Meeting in April 2006, Gabel stepped down as President. Soon after, Marquard resigned as Executive Director, Crowe was fired from his position as Program Director, Cushman lost his job as National Allround Coach, and several other staff members were fired or resigned. This series of events is what I call "The Great Purge."
I believe that speedskating sites on the internet, such as the Yahoo Skatelist and athlete blogs, played a major role in the shakeup in USSPEEDSKATING. This shakeup has been long overdue, but it hasn't happened until now. I believe the internet sites forced certain issues that USS tried to cover up out into the open, and forced the corrupt former leaders of the federation to be accountable for their actions.
The one thing I'd like to say to the parents of skaters who have just reached or are close to reaching the elite level in this sport is that the USSPEEDSKATING system that has fallen apart since the end of the 2006 Olympic season IS NOT the sports system that you expected when you and your child began your journey through the sport of speedskating. However, even though things will not be easy for you in the near future, you now have the opportunity to help set up the kind of speedskating training and development system that you want and deserve.
I hope no kid ever has to have the kind of speedskating career that I did. I hope the new administration of USS will have more integrity and will be better for the athletes. Now, I'm going to get on with my life.
posted by Eva at 9:35 AM
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