Oh, yes, Ohno can leave Turin with head held high

TURIN, Italy – It was a look of elation, almost astonishment.

Thrill-and-spill short track is never this easy. Apolo Anton Ohno knows that better than most.

The men’s 500 final was supposed to be roller derby on ice, a skate-digging, elbow-flying, skater-disqualifying 42 seconds of mayhem on blades.

That’s what short track racing is all about.

Finish second and you can still win, as Ohno did four years ago. Crawl across the finish line and you might get a silver, just as he did in another race in Salt Lake City.

Saturday evening was merely a stroll to gold. It was so easy that when Ohno crossed the finish line he opened his mouth wide, lifted his arms over his head and exalted in a moment so perfect he seemed to wonder how it could have been.

In a sport that loves disqualifications, you half expected the judges to toss out the entire group for being too polite.

Figure skaters were sprawling all over the place on the same ice two nights earlier. No one laid a hand on anyone else, much less the ice, in this final.

It was the race Ohno had to dream about as he spent the years since Salt Lake living in a dorm room and training for a sport so unpredictable that even being the best skater doesn’t guarantee you’ll get on the medals podium.

And it only got better.

He finished with two medals for the evening, three in the Olympics, after he anchored the U.S. team to a third-place finish in the team 5,000. He passed an Italian on the next-to-last lap to do that, but that was just a bonus after the 500 meters.

It was there that Ohno got a gift to get into the final, got the inside position on the start draw that every skater wants, and then got a bit of a lean in front of the other four racers just as the gun sounded.

The rest was simply a matter of keeping everyone behind him.

“For me it was the perfect race,” he said.

Ohno probably deserved an Olympics free of controversy and spills after his first games in Salt Lake City. The soul-patched one was a media darling there, but also a controversial winner in the 1,500 when the South Korean who finished first was disqualified.

If that gold medal was a bit tarnished, this one was squeaky clean.

“I was happy before this medal,” he said. “But to be able to come here and finish it like this is pretty spectacular.”

It was hard to tell what was more fun for Ohno: winning the gold medal or celebrating that win with almost boyish glee.

Ohno may look like a rebel with the slice of hair that runs from his lower lip down his chin, but he’s a team player and more all-American than the kid next door.

He took a victory lap in front of his flag-waving countrymen, hugged family members and almost leaped into a group of family and friends waiting just off the ice.

“Just emotion, so much emotion and passion,” Ohno said. “Everything was running through my body. It was crazy.”

So is short track, a sport where you never know whether you’ll be in the next race, much less the next Olympics. And coming into Saturday it hadn’t been a great games for Ohno.

He nearly fell in the 1,500 and was eliminated in the semifinals, and had to settle for bronze in the 1,000 after being overtaken on the next-to-last turn on a brilliant pass by South Korea’s Lee Ho-suk.

Ohno wasn’t the star attraction in Turin that he had been for the American team in Salt Lake City. That distinction belonged to Michelle Kwan and Bode Miller.

Still, Ohno believed he could match what he did in Salt Lake or do better.

“The pressures were a little bit different,” he said. “At no point did I ever think I didn’t have the ability to make that podium.”

Sometimes it takes more than ability in short track.

The sport is a lot like NASCAR, where the biggest cheers are for the wipeouts, especially when two or more skaters crash into the boards.

Ohno now has five Olympic medals – two of them gold. The soul patch gets him recognized more than the average speedskater, and he’s a star in the world in which he competes.

Every so often there are perfect races and perfect days.

His happened to come at just the right moment, when everything mattered.