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www.universalsports.com/ViewArtic....TCLID=204789561Celski shooting for spot on U.S. speed skating squad in VancouverTue Sep 08, 2009 By Meri-Jo Borzilleri / Special to Universal Sports
Short track speed skater J.R. Celski had a fluid style and an easy label -- the kid who would be the next Apolo Ohno.
Celski started inline racing at age four at the same Federal Way, Wash. rink where Ohno, eight years his elder, also skated. Ohno hung out with Celski's older brothers.
"I just remember him being a chunky little guy and being fast," Celski said of Ohno.
After Ohno moved to the ice, Celski, still inline racing, was watching on TV when Ohno won gold in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. Celski's mom, Sue, reminded him he used to practice with Ohno.
He turned to his mom. That's what I want to do, he said. With that, the path was set.
"As a kid I had big goals," he said. "One of them was to do what he did."
This week, Celski is poised to skate in the U.S. Olympic trials in short track speed skating starting Tuesday in Marquette, Mich. The trials will determine the five men and five women skaters who can qualify for the U.S. team in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada, less than a four-hour drive from Celski's hometown. The 10 skaters who qualify this week will compete for starting positions during the World Cup circuit this fall, culminating at the fourth meet of the series -- also in Marquette -- Nov. 12-15.
Going from promising speedster to heir apparent wasn't a steady progression for Celski. After most of a childhood spent going in ever-faster circles, Celski had to survive an abrupt detour.
The Olympic Trials are the culmination of years of training and dreaming. It also may be the time when Celski skates out of Ohno's shadow. Celski, just 19, has been part of the Olympic buzz for years, even before he was old enough to qualify for the Games. He was 17 days too young for the 2006 Olympics.
"I really wasn't able to skate that fast at the time," Celski said in a telephone interview from Salt Lake City, where he moved a year ago to train with the U.S. national team. "People hyped it up because I was young and I was fast. I wasn't really close to making an appearance at the Olympics."
Now he is, and right where many believe he was destined to be.
Like Ohno, he left home at a young age -- 14 -- to train in California under Dutch-born coach Wilma Boomstra, a technical wizard on ice. His older brother, Chris, moved with him to help. Celski enrolled at a local high school and worked his way to a No. 2 world junior ranking by 2006. But something wasn't right.
After the 2006 Junior World Championships, a back injury forced him off the ice for a couple months. When he returned, his enthusiasm didn't.
"We felt he was on a little bit of a burnout," said his mother, Sue, in a telephone interview. "He had been skating since he was 3, racing since 4. That was all he'd known."
Celski quit skating and moved back home to Washington.
"I couldn't believe it," Boomstra said. "It broke my heart."
They kept in touch. Boomstra told him she understood; it was his decision.
"But the talent you had, you're going to come back," she kept telling him.
For 13 long months, he didn't. He enrolled in his hometown high school's junior class and got back in touch with friends from his middle-school days. He played guitar in a band and got a part-time marketing job, pitching smoothies to local stores. He didn't skate.
"I was young, anxious,” he said. “I wanted to go home. I wanted to relax, be a kid. I got a chance to experience being a kid. It was a big boost."
Celski even joined the school swim team. For the first time in his life, he was bad at a sport. He struggled to make the team, worked hard but didn't do well in races. Once, while racing the 800-meter freestyle, Celski came in last, two laps behind everyone else. Oddly, he enjoyed it.
"It was kind of a cool experience for me. I was the one to cheer for at the end," said Celski, who deferred enrollment in college at Cal-Berkeley this fall to compete. "It was a great thing for me. I got to see the opposite side of the spectrum … kind of like being the last kid picked."
Halfway through the school year, Celski felt something was missing. He told his parents he needed to go back to skating. So he moved back to Long Beach and Boomstra's rink, this time with his father, Bob, moving in to help with cooking and school.
"When he came back he was different," Boomstra said. "He was more with one goal, instead of going in all these different directions."
In the summer of 2008, with Boomstra's good wishes, Celski moved to Salt Lake City and U.S. national team headquarters, where he could train with the country's best skaters under coach Jae Su Chun. Skating with renewed purpose, a refreshed and hungry Celski made the World Cup team last season.
Then, it happened. At the world championships last spring in Vienna, Austria, he reached another plateau -- he beat Ohno.
"I'm pretty sure he's not used to that," Celski said.
Celski defeated the five-time Olympic medalist twice, at 1,500 and 3,000 meters. Ohno, who won Olympic gold in the 1,500 (2002) and 500 (2006), beat Celski in the 1,000. Celski's breakthrough meet ended with him finishing second overall in the world championships behind Korea's Lee Ho-Suk.
Celski generates his speed with an uncommon feel for the ice and near flawless technique, honed under Boomstra's watch.
"It makes him very smooth," Boomstra said.
Even though it's been a year since he left Boomstra's California rink, the two talk almost every day.
"It was about time," Boomstra said. "I knew if anybody would beat Apolo, and not just won out of luck, I knew it was going to be J.R. He and I talked about this, many times, not just to beat Apolo, but just to be the best in the world."
Celski said his relationship with his former idol has changed with the inevitable friction that comes with close competition. They're polite to one another, but not friends. More like wary acquaintances.
"We're an individual sport,” he says. “We're all training for the same goals and have the same dreams. It's hard to be overly friendly with people who want the same things as you. We're, I wouldn't say best buddies. We're cordial and we're friendly, I think all of us are on the team. There's no animosity between us."
Every now and then he'll sneak a peek at Ohno at the rink and weight room.
"You always want to know what your competition's doing," he said.
If all goes well this week at the Olympic trials, they'll be taking on the world -- and each other -- come February in Vancouver.
It will be a virtual home Olympic Games for the two Seattle-area skaters. Besides potentially increasing the U.S. haul for individual medals, their presence would add to the chance for Olympic gold in the three-man relay. The U.S. won bronze in 2006.
The 27-year-old Ohno, in his third and likely final Olympics, needs one more medal to break Eric Heiden's record for most-decorated U.S. male speed skater in the Olympics. It would be the final chapter in a sparkling career.
For Celski, it might be the start of another. The kid who began skating on Fisher-Price plastic skates, the ones that attached to your street shoes, now has some bigger shoes to fill."I look at this Olympics as one of the, if not the most important event in my life,” he says. “I've been training for this since I was a little kid. And just the fact that it's close to home is big thing for me.
"The local news will be there, the local friends, I grew up there, that's what I've represented since I was a little kid. Just knowing it’s in that area is a big boost for me to excel and try to make it there. I'm real excited about that.”