MILWAUKEE -- Chad Hedrick once walked into the Pettit National Ice Center, glanced up at the long-track speedskating rink records posted on a board in the lobby and nonchalantly predicted which ones he'd break that weekend.
Then he went out and broke them.
That was back when Hedrick was The Man , an inline legend from Spring, Texas, who crossed over to the ice as a mercenary--his only goal was to win Olympic medals--and left a string of shattered world records and emasculated speedskaters in his vapor trail.
At first, the Europeans and particularly the Dutch, for whom speedskating is a national obsession, laughed at the brash, strutting Texan who hopped and chopped his way around the oval. Then, he started beating them.
Then, he started crushing them.
Two years after stepping on ice for the first time, Hedrick completed his meteoric rise with the 2004 world allround title in Hamar, Norway. As upsets go, it was as if the Dutch national basketball team had come to the Staples Center, shut down Kobe Bryant and thumped the Los Angeles Lakers by 30.
Hedrick capped his amazing run at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin by winning three medals, one of each hue: gold (5,000 meters), silver (10,000) and bronze (1,500).
"He arguably was the best skater in the world at one point," says Derek Parra, a gold medalist at the 2002 Olympics and now the U.S. allround coach.
Flash forward three years and it all seems like ancient history. Hedrick is no longer the cocky athlete who struck fear in the hearts of opponents, who took a perverse pleasure in melting the legs of those foolish enough to race him, who encouraged comparisons to the incomparable Eric Heiden.
When he enters the Pettit Center this week for the U.S. Olympic trials, he's likely to pass under the record board without even looking up.
Humbled by poor results and setbacks since Turin and changed by marriage and fatherhood, Hedrick's goal is simply to skate fast enough to make the U.S. team for the 2010 Vancouver Games.
"Life is completely different," he says, flashing a smile that says he's happier for it. "I have a 5-month-old little girl now and life is quite a bit different than it used to be. Starting a family has changed me from head to toe.
"I used to go to the rink and that was the focus of my day. It was all about me proving to the world I was the best (in Turin). This time it's about making special memories with my family, and skating is just my tool to do that.
"I'm excited. It may sound different, and it is different. I've grown up. It's been four years. From 28 to 32, with the steps I've made in life, can change a person's attitude completely."
Don't misunderstand. Hedrick isn't here to wave to the crowd and go through the motions. He's too proud and too talented to settle for middle of the pack. He's hardwired with the one trait shared by every great athlete, no matter the sport: He hates to lose as much as he loves to win.
Rest assured Hedrick will rise to the occasion at the Pettit Center. The question is, how high?
"Technically, I want to skate well," he says. "Do I think I'm going to be in my best physical condition? No, I don't. I don't think I'll be close. But I don't need to be at my best in October in Milwaukee. I need to be my best when everyone is watching in Vancouver in February."
It will be a challenge to get there.
Hedrick had surgery this summer to clean up a hip, which set back his training a month. He's trying to regain his form--and his confidence--on the heels of a three-year slump in which he all but disappeared from the podium.
Initially, lack of motivation was a problem. Hedrick loves competing and winning, but he doesn't love speedskating. The sport was simply a means to an end. It gave him a chance to win Olympic medals, something he couldn't do as an inline skater. Not surprisingly, after Turin he had a hard time getting excited about training for World Cups.
"It's become more and more of a job," Hedrick admits.
But in 2008, with Vancouver looming, it was time to get serious again. U.S. Speedskating had hired former Dutch Olympic champion Bart Veldkamp to coach the allround team in Salt Lake City, and getting Hedrick back on track was Veldkamp's pet project.
It turned out to be a disaster.
Veldkamp turned the skater's training regimen upside down. For the first time in his life, Hedrick was spending hours in the weight room and pounding the pavement on a bike. On the ice, Veldkamp changed his unorthodox rocking style, a carryover from his inline days, and how and when he pushed with each stroke.
"Chad was taught to skate more like the Dutch skaters," Parra says. "He had a different stroke frequency last year and a different look on the ice than he did when he won in '06. There was a different timing when he pushed and how long he had contact with the ice.
"I skated behind the guy for a number of years and I knew where he made speed. It wasn't at the end of his push, it was through the middle part of his push. I would wait during that time and gather some push and pressure and he'd be kind of skating away from me."
At least in part because Hedrick couldn't adapt--he was still, after all, one of the U.S. team's best hopes for medals in Vancouver--Veldkamp was let go in early April and Parra replaced him as the allround coach.
Hedrick doesn't hold Veldkamp responsible for his poor results during the 2008-'09 season.
"When Bart started I really knew little about him other than that he was a skater," Hedrick says. "I didn't know his philosophies as a coach. But when you get a new coach, the No. 1 thing you have to do is believe in him, or nothing makes sense at all.
"So the first goal for me was to give this guy a chance and really buy into his program. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Unfortunately, it took a year away but at the same time it wasn't an Olympic year."
Parra's goal is to get Hedrick back to his more natural skating style.
"He was born a skater," Parra says. "He just naturally knew how to skate. Give him a basketball, he's OK. He looks kind of goofy on a bike. But you put the guy on ice and he floats. It's an amazing thing."
Time is not on their side. Hedrick probably will have to train right through the fall World Cup season so he can peak in Vancouver.
"I think the biggest thing for him," Parra says, "is to get some confidence back in his racing."
When Hedrick was at his best, he knew his lap times in each race down to the hundredth of a second. He'd watch a rival race, study the lap times and say, "I can beat that," because he'd done it every day in training for months.
"He has to get that back again," Parra says. "Do I think he can? Yeah. Do we have enough time? Only God knows. He's already been there. We've just to get him back there again. He knows how to win. He likes to win. I'm starting to see that fire again, where he hates losing, you know? That's how you want him to be. He's got to be that brash Texan again."
A certain amount of the cockiness is gone, however, perhaps forever. Hedrick is changing diapers now. He and wife Lynsey are building their dream house in Houston. Family goals, not individual ones, have given him perspective. He isn't the same man who set out to win five gold medals in Turin and unfairly took U.S. teammate Shani Davis to task for not helping him in the team pursuit.
"We're going to bury the hatchet on all the stuff that happened before and move on," Hedrick says.
Going into Vancouver, his goals are more modest. For one thing, he will enter only two individual races, plus the team pursuit. He'll skate the 1,500, his bread and butter, and either the 1,000 or the 5,000.
This time around it's all about the Olympic experience. Hedrick is skating as much for Lynsey and his daughter, Hadley, as he is for himself.
"I'm going to focus on a couple events and enjoy the process, rather than skating every two or three days and not being able to see my family and not being able to go and see other sports," he says. "I want to live the Olympic experience this time. I want to feel like I'm at something special, not just laying on the massage table every day, getting ready for a race."
No matter the outcome, Hedrick will walk away after Vancouver with no regrets. Retirement, he says, is a dead certainty. But there will be plenty of other mountains to climb. He'll work on lowering his single-digit handicap in golf. Maybe he'll sell insurance. Who knows?
For now, for one more time, for one last hurrah, he's giving 100 percent to speedskating.
"I think I'll be back," he says. "And I'll be somebody the other skaters will have to deal with."
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OLYMPIC TRIALS
What: U.S. Olympic / World Cup qualifier for long-track speedskating.
When: Wednesday through Saturday.
Where: Pettit National Ice Center, Milwaukee.
Schedule (all times CDT): Wednesday -- 6 p.m., men's and women's 500 meters. Thursday -- 6 p.m., women's 1,000 and 3,000, men's 1,000 and 5,000. Saturday -- 1 p.m., men's and women's 1,500. Sunday--women's 1,000 and 5,000, men's 1,000 and 10,000. There is no competition on Friday.
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