SPECIAL SECTION/CANADA'S TEAM/SPEED SKATING	FEBRUARY 2, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 4
	Blade Runners Four years after her disastrous fall in Norway, Catriona LeMay Doan is setting world records on clap skates. So is Jeremy Wotherspoon By DAVE STUBBS he cannot drive the horrible moment out of her mind, only push it back a little farther. Feb. 19, 1994, Lillehammer, Norway: the 17th Winter Games. Catriona LeMay Doan was racing in her heat of the 500 m when she caught an edge, hit the ice and crashed into a barrier before millions of television viewers. It was months before she found the courage to get back on skates. But four years later, she may be about to bring all her rivals at Nagano to their knees. Now 27, the ebullient Saskatoon native is the world-record holder in both the 500 m (37.55 sec.) and the 1,500 m (1 min. 57.87 sec.), marks she has set in the past few months in Calgary. LeMay Doan has excelled on the hinged "clap skates" that every top skater wears today. They are designed to keep the skating blade on the ice longer and let skaters take more powerful strides. LeMay Doan is the main headliner of a 17-member long-track speed-skating team of unprecedented talent and depth. Jeremy Wotherspoon of Red Deer, Alta., an unflappable Olympic rookie at 21, is the world-record holder in the 1,000 m (1 min. 10.16 sec.), a mark he set last December. So strong is the squad that Winnipeg native Susan Auch, 31, the brilliant 500-m silver medalist at Lillehammer, goes to Nagano almost lost in the shadows. Neal Marshall, 28, from Coquitlam, B.C., a two-time Olympian in the 1,500 and 5,000 and former world-record holder in the 1,500 m, made the team largely through the benevolence of Wotherspoon, who stepped down in the 1,500 so Marshall could compete instead. Marshall had failed to meet qualifying standards because of a respiratory illness. Canada's roller derby-esque short-track speed-skating team (racing at 500, 1,000 and in relays in the close confines of a hockey rink) is another powerhouse. The Canadian team has won, all told, two gold, 10 silver and four bronze medals since the discipline became a demonstration event in 1988 (it became an official sport in 1992). Two Quebeckers, Marc Gagnon of Chicoutimi and Isabelle Charest of Montreal, will lead the 12 Canadians who have qualified for each of the six races on the Nagano program. Gagnon and Charest have won bronze and silver, respectively, and will anchor the relays, usually strong events for Canada. One star, however, will be absent from the ice: Montreal short-track artiste Nathalie Lambert, 34, who won a gold medal in the women's relay at Albertville and earned two silvers at Lillehammer. Lambert crashed heavily into the boards during a competition in the Netherlands last autumn, shattering her ankle. She will be in Nagano as a Radio-Canada analyst. The very mention of crashing used to send LeMay Doan into a depression. No more. "I'm skating better than ever. I've matured, and I'm more concerned with what is in my control," she says. "I've worked on all these things in the past, but you can't rush them. It takes time to find the perspective that works for you." LeMay Doan began speed skating as a 10-year-old in Saskatoon, coming to the sport from ringette. Her earliest memories of racing aren't terribly pleasant: "I mostly recall falling down a lot--I just couldn't adjust to the long blades." Maybe she also couldn't adjust to the absence of cinders. All the while she struggled with speed skating, LeMay Doan was developing into a track star of some luster. She represented Saskatchewan at the 1993 Canada Games in the heptathlon and hurdles. Only when she dropped track training two summers ago did she begin to show her full skating power. In the past year, guided by national sprint-team coach Derrick Auch, she has discovered a confidence she lacked after the Lillehammer disaster. Her whole attitude, she says, has changed. "People accuse me of smiling all the time, and that's O.K. with me," she says. Much of her positive attitude she attributes to her reaffirmed religious faith: both LeMay Doan and her husband Bart, a member of the Calgary Olympic Oval's ice-maintenance crew in winter and a rodeo cowboy in summer, are devout Christians. Time spent with Bart's father, a pastor, helped strengthen her faith. LeMay Doan's fellow world-record holder, Wotherspoon, is as shy as she is effervescent--but no less determined. Only two years ago, Wotherspoon was racing in the junior ranks, where he set world records in both the 500 m and the 1,000 m. He has made the transition to the clap skate this season and is lopping seconds off his top junior times. He won a World Cup silver last season in his first year as a senior-level competitor. "I know they'll be gunning for me," Wotherspoon says of his competition, "but I only expect to be going faster at the Olympics." Born in Humboldt, Sask., Wotherspoon moved to Red Deer as an infant and stayed through high school. Then he moved 60 miles south to attend the University of Calgary and train at the Oval. This season Wotherspoon had won four World Cup events by the Christmas break. Even now, he says, "I look at every performance and see room for improvement. My coach and sports psychologist say that sometimes I'm too analytical, but I'm not serious all the time. I want to keep loose and have some fun." By that he means mainly fly-fishing when the ice melts, though he is also a bit of a practical joker. "This is our best-ever team," enthuses Robert Bolduc, Canadian Amateur Speed Skating Association technical-program director. "Five medals would be a very good Olympics for us, but we could have more." In other words, fans, get ready to start clapping.
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