Bonnie Blair’s mother had a feeling about the baby growing inside her. A premonition of a superathlete? A hint that five gold medals were in the future? Quite the opposite.
“My mom was forty-five and my dad was fifty-two when I was born,” said Blair. “They didn’t have all of the tests we have now. For most of the pregnancy, Mom thought that she was going to have a child that she would need to attend to for the rest of her life. She thought there was a high probability that there would be something wrong with me.”
Bonnie was the sixth child born to Charles (nicknamed Chili) and Eleanor Blair. Eleanor had had five miscarriages, and Bonnie’s closest sibling was eight years older. On March 18, 1964, Chili drove Eleanor to the hospital to give birth, but he didn’t stay. He was too busy taking the rest of the kids to a speedskating practice.
“You have to remember, husbands weren’t allowed in the delivery room,” Bonnie explained. “Me being the sixth kid, they had already been there, done that, plus there were the five other kids to look after. He dropped my mom off at the steps of the hospital and was like, okay, let us know what happens.”
A few hours later he found out via an announcement over the public address system at the rink. “‘The Blairs have a new daughter!’” laughed Bonnie fifty years later. “That’s how they knew whether I was a boy or a girl.”
Just three months after the healthy Bonnie Kathleen Blair entered the world, Chili, a civil engineer, was transferred back to Champaign, Illinois, where they had lived before Bonnie was born. Bonnie grew up in a happy household, although she often felt like an only child due to the age gap between her and her brothers and sisters. On the other hand, having so many older siblings provided her with a comforting sense of having numerous parents.
Young Bonnie took to sports quickly and participated in everything from skating to softball, track to cheerleading, and swim team. In fact, that’s where her first source of internal conflict was. “I remember the point where I didn’t want to do swim team anymore,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘How am I going to tell my dad?’ My insides would just churn. He liked going to meets and timing, and I thought I was going to disappoint him.”
Finally, the laid-back man of few words brought it up himself, asking Bonnie what she thought of swimming. “I said, ‘You know, Dad, I don’t think I want to do this anymore,’ and he was like, ‘Okay.’ That’s all he said, okay. I was like, that’s it? Okay? My insides have been turning inside out for weeks and that’s it? That was easy.”
She began to gravitate toward speedskating. The family love of the sport had started by accident long before she was born. Bonnie’s sisters Suzy and Mary had been given figure skates as a present, and they were tooling around the local rink when a speedskating coach approached them and told them they should try his sport instead. The girls went home and reported this to Eleanor, who initially pooh-poohed the idea. “But then they were at the grocery store and ran into the guy and my sisters said, ‘Oh, there’s Dick, he’s the guy who says we should be speedskaters,’” said Blair.
Something about the chance meeting convinced Eleanor to let the kids give it a shot, and they joined a local speedskating club. Eleanor looked high and low for white speedskates, as her daughters loved the white boots of figure skates. Eventually, Eleanor figured out they simply don’t make white speedskates and bought a more traditional dark color. Still, Suzy and Mary took to it, and eventually speedskating became a family pastime.
Chili, a Yale alumnus, was a good athlete who enjoyed playing basketball. Both Chili and Eleanor were avid golfers. They also liked going onto the ice to skate with the kids but did not consider themselves exceptionally gifted athletically.
After the family relocated to Champaign, they began traveling the Midwest for meets. Almost every weekend from November 1 through March the Blairs piled in the family car and headed to a meet in a neighboring city or state, foregoing vacations and spring breaks. Bonnie remembered, “That’s where we spent our money, all of these meets. When people talked about vacations, I was like, ‘I’ve never been on a vacation.’”
Yet Bonnie never felt pushed into the sport. Speedskating was a natural for her, and she thrived on all aspects of it. She looked forward to meets every weekend and couldn’t wait for the winter season to start.
During this time Bonnie got to know fellow speedskater Dan Jansen, who grew up and trained in West Allis, Wisconsin, three and a half hours from Champaign. The two families were friendly even before Dan and Bonnie were born. “When there was a meet in Champaign, Dan’s brother Dick would stay at our house. If there was a meet in Milwaukee, my brother Rob would stay at his house.” Bonnie was one year older than Dan, but the two of them grew up skating in essentially the same age group, and both their fathers timed local races. Bonnie always remembers “DJ” in the blue tights and jersey with an orange stripe that the West Allis team wore.
She was buoyed by a lot of success early on against her peers. But there was one bump. At about age twelve or thirteen the young teen was growing quickly and began to feel like her body would not perform the way she wanted it to. “I couldn’t skate my way out of a paper bag,” she laughed. “I remember that being a very frustrating time and thinking, do I want to do this anymore? I remember having a lot of people come up to encourage me and tell me, ‘Don’t worry, you’re just going through a growth stage; don’t give up on it.’”
PIONEERS OF WOMEN’S SPEEDSKATING
Women’s speedskating did not make the Olympic program until 1960, thirty-six years after men’s speedskating debuted. Long before Bonnie Blair became a household name, many other women came through Wisconsin and took their talents to the ice. Here are some of the women who made huge contributions in the years 1968–1980.
Dianne Holum, 1968, 1972
Chicago native Dianne Holum began training as a teen in West Allis, Wisconsin, shortly after the Olympic Oval opened in 1966. Her first Olympics came just two years later in Grenoble, France, when she was only sixteen. In the 500 meters, she finished in a three-way tie for second place with two other Americans, Jenny Fish and Mary Meyers. They all had crossed in exactly the same time, 46.3 seconds, and all three won a silver medal. Holum also took home a bronze that year in the 1,000. Four years later, twenty-year-old Dianne was back for more in Sapporo, Japan. Dianne was chosen to be the US flag bearer in the opening ceremonies, which she called “an honor that is hard to put into words.” She took home her first and only gold, in the 1,500 meters, and capped her skating career three days later with a silver in the 3,000 meters.
Holum retired after the 1972 Games. She wasn’t yet twenty-one but felt ready to coach. Her most famous pupils would be Eric and Beth Heiden and Bonnie Blair. She also taught physical education at two Milwaukee high schools and later coached her own daughter, Kristin, in the 1998 Winter Games.
Sheila Young, 1972, 1976
Like Dianne Holum before her and so many afterward, Sheila Young moved to Milwaukee to be near the Olympic Ice Rink. A native of Birmingham, Michigan, Young competed at the 1972 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, at the same time as Holum. While Holum was winning her first gold, twenty-one-year-old Young finished just one spot from the podium in her event, coming in fourth in the 500 meters. The following year Young did something amazing: she won World Championships in both speedskating and cycling in one year. Then in 1976 she burst onto the Olympics scene, becoming the first woman to win three medals at a Winter Olympics as she took gold in the 500, silver in the 1,500, and bronze in the 1,000. She and her husband, Olympic cyclist Jim Ochowicz, lived in Waukesha, Wisconsin, for many years, and their daughter, Elli, was a speedskater in the 2002 and 2006 Games. Sheila later became a middle school physical education teacher in northern California.
Leah Poulos-Mueller, 1972, 1976, 1980
How many people can say they’ve had their face on a box of cereal? Leah Poulos did just prior to her second Olympics in 1976, when she was featured on the front of the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes container. Leah, who hailed from Northbrook, Illinois, and trained in West Allis, competed in three Olympics, collecting silver medals in the latter two (1976 in the 1,000 and 1980 in the 500 and 1,000). She married gold medal–winning speedskater Peter Mueller (who coached Dan Jansen and Bonnie Blair) and became a lawyer in the Milwaukee area.
Chili also stepped in to give his daughter a pep talk. “He was the one that put the idea in my head, maybe I could go to the Olympics, maybe I could win a medal,” Bonnie said. It was profound advice from a man Bonnie deeply respected but rarely heard much from.
“We would go back and forth to Chicago for meets and I would think, did he even talk to me this weekend? He just was a very quiet person,” she explained. “But the thing is, when he did say something it always seemed to have an impact. He was very involved—he was at every practice and meet I ever had. Maybe he was so quiet because he was in a family where all of the females demanded so much talking space. He didn’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise!”
While in high school, Bonnie made the US National Team. This led to more training, more meets, and packets of training programs sent to the house. It also meant being encouraged to train at the outdoor Wisconsin Olympic Ice Rink near Milwaukee. Just as Bonnie’s parents began to look around for a host family, one appeared almost magically before them. The corporate lawyer for Chili’s civil engineering firm lived in Elm Grove, Wisconsin. Bill and Rita Denny had six kids, most of them grown, and they were happy to open their home for Bonnie. “They became my Milwaukee family,” Bonnie said. “My parents would come and stay with them sometimes too; we basically moved into their house and spent Christmas and other holidays with them.”
She would live with the Dennys for weeks at a time, putting in long hours at the rink. Then after high school Bonnie’s sister Angela moved to Milwaukee with her husband, and Bonnie lived with them. She took some junior college courses in the summer, but it was clear where her focus was.
In 1984 nineteen-year-old Bonnie qualified for her first Olympic Trials. Her dad’s confidence that she could make an Olympic team came back to her in a crystal-clear moment as she prepared for her races. She was being coached by Eric Heiden’s old coach, Dianne Holum, as well as Mike Crowe. As Bonnie recalls the trials, “They were taking something like five [athletes] to the Olympics in the 500, and I’m guessing I finished third.” Bonnie made the trip to Sarajevo for that race, the 500 meters. From the moment she got there she felt powerful emotions about being at her first Olympics. “It was kind of like being that kid in a candy store,” she later told a writer for the website Olympic.org. “You can’t believe you’re here, this is unbelievable, just total excitement and thrill with every aspect that went with the Games, from Opening Ceremonies, walking in, to the crowd. I was able to pick out my mom and my two sisters who were in the crowd. And that just brought tears to my eyes. It was just so overwhelming to think, ‘OK, the whole world is watching this.’”
As the week went on, she was thrilled by fellow athletes she met in the cafeteria of the village, a little overwhelmed by the guards with machine guns, but overall loving the entire experience. Then came her race. On February 10, 1984, she skated a time of 42.53, which landed her in eighth place in the 500. She was more than a second behind the gold medal winner, Christa Luding-Rothenburger of East Germany, but that mattered little. It felt like a victory for the nineteen-year-old. “If you had seen me cross the finish line, you probably would have thought I had won, because I was so excited with this result that I had. It was way above my expectations,” she said.
The ’84 Olympics were a wonderful learning experience and gave her a chance to get over the thrill and the nerves of just being there, a lesson that would greatly help her four years later. Having her mother and two of her sisters there was also very meaningful. She didn’t know it yet, but it was only a tiny taste of the contingent that would follow Bonnie in future Olympics. The media would dub them “the Blair Bunch” as the group swelled to twenty-five in Calgary, forty-five in Albertville, and sixty in Lillehammer.
After her experience at Sarajevo, Bonnie knew she would do anything to return to the Olympic stage. She spent the next four years training, pushing herself, and dominating others in competitions.
As 1988 approached, both Bonnie Blair and Dan Jansen were getting ready for their second go at the Olympics. Both had monstrous amounts of talent and high hopes. These Games were expected to be a breakthrough moment for both of them. Bonnie was staying at the Jansens’ house on that heartbreaking day when the phone call came to tell them that Dan’s sister Jane had been diagnosed with leukemia. “Talk about your heart being stabbed,” remembered Blair.
Bonnie was dealing with her own family medical crisis. Her father had been diagnosed with lung cancer and had already begun chemotherapy and radiation. Still, Dan and Bonnie headed to Calgary with the rest of Team USA. Bonnie remembers her reaction when Dan found out Jane had died. “I remember seeing him in the hallway kind of crouched down and just crying. It was one of those things where there wasn’t anything you could do except give him a hug and wish him well. He decided to skate. A lot of people [ask], should he have skated or shouldn’t he have skated? I’m not sure if there would have been a doubt in my mind whether I would have skated too. I guess I wouldn’t have realized that there would be an option.”
When Jansen fell in his first race, the 500, Bonnie’s heart dropped. “It was very upsetting to our whole team. We were all pretty close even though it’s an individual sport. We train together and live under the same roof for eight months out of the year. It was a hard time on our team.”
Jansen would slip again four days later in the 1,000. Bonnie had yet to skate her first race. As she prepared to take the ice on February 22, she had to try to put DJ’s falls out of her thoughts. “I went back to my dad, who is strong-minded, and I was somehow able to put it out of my mind for the race,” she said.
One of the first to compete was the gold medal winner in the 500 in Sarajevo, Christa Luding-Rothenburger, who immediately set a world record of 39:12. Bonnie was a few pairs later. “Going to the starting line, not only do I know that I have to go faster than I ever have, but I have to [skate] a world record to even beat it,” Blair remembered. “My coach came up to me before the race with his little pad of paper, telling me, ‘You know, that one lap you did earlier this week was good enough to beat that time.’ I looked at him and said, ‘I know,’ and I just skated away from him. He was so nervous that he was making me nervous. I knew I had the ability to beat the time that she posted, but you’ve still gotta make it happen.”
Bonnie lined up at the start with thoughts of DJ, her dad, the world record, and her own long journey all dancing in her brain. But she bore down and focused on nothing but the mechanics of the race. One hundred meters in she heard the announcer yelling out the split time, and she knew she was 2⁄100ths of a second faster than the East German, Luding-Rothenburger. She was on pace to win.
“I really don’t remember anything else except crossing the finish line. I wound up beating her by that same 2⁄100 of a second [39:10]. I could cry now just thinking about it, the emotions were so powerful. I immediately started crying. One of the first long track coaches I had was on the backstretch, and I stopped and gave her a hug. I hugged my boyfriend. One of the other East Germans came by and stopped me and said, ‘That was not a race, it was a dream,’ and they caught that comment on camera. She was right—it was a dream.”
Bonnie’s supporters were all in one area—twenty-five strong, and including Chili, who attended despite cancer treatments. Bonnie clearly remembers the awards ceremony held just a short time later in the rink. She had a good view of most of the Blair Bunch. “My sister Angela was crying. My sister Suzy had a real huge big grin on her face. My brother Rob was standing next to his best friend and giving him a high five. My sister Mary was the loud, crazy, and wild one, standing up, yelling and screaming and going absolutely crazy. Then I saw my mom. She still looked scared to death, as if I were still racing. To see so many emotions, it was actually exactly what it felt like for me—so many emotions all rolled into one.”
She still hadn’t been able to get a clear view of her father or to hug anyone in the family. She was hustled off to drug testing and then scheduled for media interviews. But she cut away for a moment right after testing and found Chili and Eleanor. “The smile on my dad’s face was priceless. I had never seen my dad smile a smile that big, ever. That was the moment that was like, ‘Oh my Gosh, I won a gold medal.’ He was sick, and for him to be there and witness that first medal was very special.”
Bonnie was overjoyed with her own success, but almost immediately after seeing her parents she thought of Dan. “If I could share this medal with him …” she recalled, her voice trailing off. “I wish there was a way I could have been able to do that. I thought, God, he’s been so successful, and to have this all happen. I just wanted to share it.”
Four days later Bonnie won a bronze in the 1,000 meters as well. She left Calgary with the first two of what would eventually be six medals, five of them gold, over the next four Olympics, making her the most decorated female Olympian in Winter Games history. She won gold medals in the 500 and 1,000 in both the Albertville and Lillehammer Games in 1992 and 1994. She was the first US athlete, male or female, to be crowned at the top spot in the same event three times in a row, the first American woman to win five golds. She was the Sports Illustrated Sportswoman of the Year in 1994 and was inducted into the US Olympic Hall of Fame. Every race was special for its own reasons, but none could ever top that first gold—especially the sight of her father’s face.
Chili Blair died on Christmas Day, 1989, a year and a half after watching his daughter win gold and two days after he had been out at an ice rink timing races. He had dinner with the family, went to bed, and was gone within twenty-four hours. Officially it was pneumonia, although cancer was certainly a factor. Eleanor passed away in 2004.
Speedskating came naturally to Bonnie, and she was happy to put her swimming days behind her. BLAIR FAMILY PHOTO
At her last Olympics, in Lillehammer in 1994, Bonnie shunned the tradition of waiting to see family until after drug testing and interviews and instead climbed into the stands with her skates on to hug the Blair Bunch. Family meant everything to her, and she was incredibly moved when three hundred people, including old friends from Champaign, showed up for one of her final competitions at the Pettit Center one year after Lillehammer. The Blairs enjoyed a beer tent set up in the parking lot to create a tailgating atmosphere. It was a rocking good time.
Blair retired a few months later at age thirty-one. Meanwhile, she had found her soul mate. Dave Cruikshank was a fellow speedskater, five years younger than Bonnie, but someone she had always been friends with. “I remember once at O’Hare Airport [as the team left for a meet], Dave’s mom telling me, because I was the oldest on the team, ‘You take care of my son Dave.’” The pair got married and had two children, Grant in 1998 and Blair in 2000.
Retirement was not a difficult transition for Bonnie. She felt she had gone out on her own terms, and she stayed involved in the sport for three more years as Dave trained for his fourth Olympics (he competed in 1988, 1992, and 1994 with Bonnie and again in 1998). They would often do training bike rides and other workouts together before the ’98 Games.
Bonnie does recall a time, in the fall of her first retirement year, when the smell of wet leaves reminded her of Germany, and she thought to herself, “I should be at a World Cup right now!” She called a skating friend to wish her good luck as she left for the World Cup season, and the floodgates opened. Bonnie cried into the phone, explaining to her buddy that she was feeling nostalgic about the end of her career. But overall, Bonnie recalls most of those emotions passing quickly. The births of her children refocused her life on being a mom.
While Bonnie’s career brought her fame and adulation, it also took a physical toll. She had a difficult delivery with Grant, and the doctors told her that her muscles couldn’t relax enough after having been so honed during her time as an elite athlete. For years after the birth of the children she suffered from stress incontinence. She couldn’t bend down to pick up a laundry basket or go out for a run without leaking urine. It’s a private matter, to be sure, but one Bonnie is comfortable sharing now.
That wasn’t always the case; for years she lived in silence about it. But after two years, “I finally had the guts to say something to my OB/GYN,” she explained. That led to a fairly easy twenty-minute surgery with transvaginal tape to fix her bladder. “I was so excited to get my life back that I was ready to shout from the rooftops. People live in silence with this, and they don’t have to.”
Bonnie and Dave are happily settled in Delafield, Wisconsin, and their two children have grown up to be great athletes. Grant was drafted in 2014 by the United States Hockey League and committed to play for the Wisconsin Badgers. He has hopes of the Olympics and the NHL. Blair was a state champion gymnast in middle school until a wrist injury led her to dabble in speedskating. Bonnie is on the other side of the parent-athlete dynamic now: driving the kids to and from practices, organizing their gear and schedules, and cheering from the stands. She says they must follow their own paths, and it must come from their hearts. She models their upbringing after her own childhood.
Bonnie, daughter Blair, husband Dave Cruikshank, and son Grant show their Olympic spirit at home. BLAIR FAMILY PHOTO
Bonnie was named to President Obama’s official delegation for the closing ceremony of the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, along with Wisconsin native Eric Heiden. She started a charitable foundation, supports the American Cancer Society and the Alzheimer’s Association in memory of family members, and is a motivational speaker. She joined the Pettit Center board of directors after retirement. There was no doubt in her mind that she would settle in Wisconsin for life. “I never thought about moving elsewhere,” she explained. “I wanted to be by the Pettit and to give back.”
ALMOST AN OLYMPIAN: DONALD DRIVER
When Donald Driver came to a fork in the road of his athletic career, he became a record-setting Green Bay Packers wide receiver. But he could just as easily have chosen the other path and pursued an Olympic career. In addition to being a standout football player, Driver was a stellar track and field athlete at Alcorn State University in Mississippi. In his specialty, the high jump, he had an Olympic-caliber leap of seven feet, six inches. This qualified him for the Olympic Trials for the 1996 Games, which were to be held just a short distance away from Alcorn State in Atlanta, Georgia. Four years later he likely would have qualified for Sydney, Australia, as well.
Donald Driver went from high jumps to Lambeau leaps. MIKE MORBECK/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
But knowing the devotion needed for any professional sport, Driver had to make a decision: was he an Olympian or a football player? He turned down the invitation to the trials and kept on catching the pigskin. A seventh-round draft pick, he went on to become the Packers’ all-time leading receiver in yards and receptions. Some say the high-jumping abilities helped him scale the wall after a touchdown when the fans beckoned him to do the Lambeau Leap. We’ll never know what Driver the high jumper might have accomplished on the world stage, but Driver the football player sure kept the fans entertained.
There has been tragedy in her life. Of her five siblings, only two remain. But overall Bonnie retains a highly positive and optimistic outlook on her world. “Life is good,” she said. “Family members were taken from me way too soon, but that’s life. I can’t dwell on that, and I don’t think they’d want me to. I miss them all dearly. My parents having me at such an older age, the chances of them having been around very much longer were not great. We’re here and we’re healthy, and I’m enjoying the ride with my kids and following them.”
Sometimes she still can’t believe her own success. Her home is decorated with Olympic memorabilia. Wooden Olympic rings adorn the deck near the hot tub, and every medal is displayed in a coffee table she had made, also in the shape of Olympic rings. She likes to look at them and remember those happy times.
“You never want to take anything for granted. I loved what I did. Passion for something can take you a long way. That was a driving force in my success—I loved what I did. I had frustrating times, but through it all I never lost the love for the sport.”
