Speedskater Comes Back From Injury With Aim to Make 2 Olympic Teams By MIKE TIERNEY
Published: August 24, 2009 query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E0DE1130F936A1575BC0A96F9C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
Ryan Leveille outside the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee, where he is training to qualify for the long- and short-track speedskating teams for the 2010 Games.The speedskater Ryan Leveille was heading into a turn at 30 miles an hour during training when his blades encountered an uneven patch of ice, reducing him to an unguided missile.
Fearing two broken legs, he flung his skates skyward just before barreling butt-first into a padded wall. The outcome was doubly discomfiting: intense pain in some areas, no feeling in others.
“I hit it in the worst possible way at the worst possible time,” he said recently in a telephone interview from Milwaukee.
So Leveille, who was a brash, promising newcomer on the United States national short-track team when the crash occurred in 2004, spent the final hours of his 21st birthday at a Los Angeles hospital, flanked by his teary-eyed coaches and girlfriend. His back was broken in five places. He was lucky to have dodged paralysis.
Only three other top-flight speedskaters are known to have sustained broken backs. One returned to the ice. Two did not, one because of paralysis.
Now, even as he continues his physical and psychological recovery from the crash, Leveille (pronounced lev-ee-AY) aspires to become the first United States speedskater to be on both the short- and long-track squads at the same Olympics.
Ryan Leveille, center, with Derek Parra, left, one of his coaches, and training partner Paul Dyrud.(Lori's note: I believe that's Chad Hedrick, not Paul Dyrud...)His effort to achieve excellence in two disciplines has not been embraced by skaters, Leveille said, rendering him an outcast by parties in both camps and causing friction with the national team’s coaching staff.
Guy Thibault, the high performance director for U.S. Speedskating, applauds Leveille’s pluck, but says he thinks it is foolish.
“I’ve told him that in life, you can try two things at the same time and be good, but you can’t be the best,” Thibault said by phone this month from Salt Lake City. “It can be done, but it’s difficult. He could end up not making any team.”
Leveille’s approach to skating, and life, would seem to make him more suited for roller derby: Get out of his way, or he’ll knock you into next week.
“He doesn’t back down if he feels wronged,” his training partner Paul Dyrud said last week from Milwaukee, noting that some skaters have said that U.S. Speedskating favors its stars at the expense of others. “It might be a flaw, but it also might be one of his strengths.”
Leveille said: “I pretty much have to go against the grain. You always want to be able to do something nobody has ever done, to set a goal that people think is not possible.”
Leveille, 26, has even been at odds with speedskating’s resident celebrity, the five-time Olympic medalist Apolo Anton Ohno, once coming to blows with Ohno during a training session.
If that is not enough of a challenge, there is also turmoil within his family. Estrangement from his troubled father continues to torment him.
Giving Up His SkatesDuring his two-week hospital stay in 2004, Leveille decided to quit skating.
“The doctors are telling me I’m lucky to be walking again,” he said.
But after spending nearly four months in a two-piece fiberglass body cast back home in north Georgia, Leveille wavered.
“I started getting hungry again,” he said, adding that he was angry “that my career was being taken from me.”
An overeager Leveille rejoined the national team soon after shedding his cast, only to endure so much back pain from training that it took him 20 minutes to climb out of bed. The inherent risks of short track — high speeds, heavy traffic and sharp turns — had never concerned him before, but wormed into his psyche.
“Going into the corners, I’d feel that fear,” he said. “I was having flashbacks. It would cause my technique to change.”
Leveille quit the team, then headed to an uncle’s home in Tennessee, where he waited tables and enrolled in college.
“I didn’t think about skating for one second there,” he said. “I changed my life 180 degrees.”
This time, about the only person from skating who hounded him was Tony Goskowicz, a former Olympic medalist in short track who coached Ohno. He needed a linchpin to attract other skaters to his new training center in Milwaukee.
“Give it two weeks here,” Goskowicz said in a final plea. “If you don’t like it, you can go home.”
Leveille joined his new coach and began training in both speedskating disciplines.
Long track was unfamiliar but somewhat less dangerous because contact with other skaters is forbidden and the turns are not as acute. With Goskowicz inspecting the ice before practice to guard against potential hazards, Leveille’s phobia was soon replaced by confidence.
“My career was brought back to life,” he said.
He skated long track at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy, placing sixth in team pursuit. He now declares himself nearly healed, inside and out.
Not Fitting InLeveille was among the early wave of junior inline skaters who converted from pavement, lured by Olympic possibilities. To the speedskating establishment, they were interlopers.
For his first training session, unaware that speedskaters’ faces were the only thing that remained uncovered, Leveille scrounged up yellow dishwashing gloves to complete a comically makeshift outfit.
“They didn’t laugh at me long,” he said, “but they did laugh that day.”
They really bristled when he showed little deference, not even to Ohno.
“Nobody would ever pass him on the ice,” Leveille said of Ohno. “I did. He didn’t like that.”
Tensions resurfaced and bubbled over when the two brawled during a practice, the heftier Ohno getting the better of it.
Leveille would phone his mother at night.
“He was crying: ‘Nobody likes me, nobody wants me here,’ ” Cindy Leveille recalled from her home in Dawsonville, Ga.
Skaters, like many other Olympians, must balance a sense of teamwork — for compatibility in relays — with a me-first attitude. Stick to short track or long track, was the prevailing thinking; do not deny someone an Olympic spot by doubling up.
Leveille said skaters verbally ganged up on him at a team meeting, saying that his quest to qualify for both was inconsiderate. Some national team coaches tried to dissuade him.
“They don’t think I’m a team player,” he said. “None of them want me to do it.”
“Not even Shani thinks it’s possible,” he said of Shani Davis, the only recent skater to aim for both rosters, just missing short track in 2006.
Trials for short track are Sept. 8-12 in Marquette, Mich. The United States long track World Cup qualifying follows Oct. 21-25 in Milwaukee.
"I pretty much have to go against the grain. You always want to be able to do something nobody has ever done, to set a goal that people think is not possible,” Ryan Leveille said.Thibault confirmed that inline transfers, who might comprise the majority of the 2010 Olympic team, were not well-regarded by longtime skaters at first.
“You’ve been in speedskating for 15 years and you see a kid who’s been there a year making the national team,” he said.
In Leveille’s case, he suggested, clashing personalities may have been at the core of the problem.
“Ryan burned a few bridges with some of his teammates,” Thibault said.
Feeling unwelcome while out west with the national squad, Leveille relishes his lone-wolf course with a supportive kindred spirit/coach.
“Ryan, he’s a machine,” Goskowicz said from Milwaukee.
After the tussle with Ohno, for whom Leveille now expresses begrudging admiration, Goskowicz said: “Apolo swore he would never lose to Ryan, but he did. Apolo, for a while, was the strongest guy mentally and physically I’ve seen. This guy is just as strong.”
Distant RelationshipAs a young teen, Leveille would step between his parents to protect his mother during arguments, he and his mother said, and it was Ryan who pushed for a divorce.
Leveille’s father, Jimmy Wayne Cox, a former dental technician, has been homeless on and off ever since, they said.
Leveille became the all-too-young man of the house, which included his younger sister, Jennifer. A good thing, his mother said, “but it probably put too much pressure on him.”
At 21, in a gesture of appreciation, he legally changed his surname from Cox to Leveille, his mother’s maiden name. He rarely sees his father.
“I don’t speak to him because I want only positive things in my life,” he said. “I love him. He’s my father. I tried to help him for years. At some point, people need to help themselves. It breaks my heart to think about what’s happened.”
Cindy Leveille said: “He’s afraid to get close and get let down again. He kind of shields his heart from that.”
Ryan Leveille tried to see a therapist, but did not stick with it.
“I don’t need someone else to tell me how I should feel,” he said. “They’re not in my shoes.”
His mother calls it a Leveille trait: “We feel like we can take care of anything on our own.”
For one Leveille, a dual Olympic chase is playing out on his own.
Tags: Charles Ryan Leveille / Short Track Speedskating
Also a lot of galleries of the long trackers as well) 
