For All Involved, It’s Staggering

The phone rang at 6 in the morning. It was Mike. In Wisconsin, it was only an hour later than it was in this part of Canada, so Dan Jansen knew if his brother was calling this early, it must be bad news. He had a pretty good idea how bad.

If somebody was waking him before sun-up, on the same day he would be going for an Olympic gold medal, it could be only one of two things. Either Jane was worse, or Jane was dead.

Jansen’s insides were in a knot. He had called home late the night before. His sister was still in West Allis Memorial, still weak, not getting any better. The hospital’s chemotherapy treatments, for her leukemia, were weakening her liver. Jane was hanging on for her life. Dan told Mike to wish her Happy Valentine’s Day. He told Mike to kiss her for him.

Sleep came hard. Sunday afternoon, the speed skater would be racing in the 500 meters, his favorite event. Saturday night, it was his mind that was racing. He thought about everything he and his sister had shared. He thought about something he was unable to share, last winter, when Jane needed a bone marrow transplant, and their sister, Joanne, was the donor, because Dan was recovering from mononucleosis.

He wanted to do something to help. He wanted to give blood. He wanted to give his sister more time--or at least more of his time, because he had been so preoccupied with the World Championships and Winter Olympics and all.

In Europe, he wrote her letters. He told her if it meant he had to give up skating forever, to be and stay at her side, he wouldn’t give it a second thought. “After all, we’re talking about her life,” he said. “What’s the Olympics compared to that?”

And now, here was Mike, calling at 6 o’clock Sunday morning, 11 hours before his brother would have the race of his life. Mike was a speed skater, too, a member of the U.S. national team. He knew how much the Olympic race meant, how much a good night’s sleep meant. Yet, here he was, calling with news that would make the 1988 Olympics, Danny’s second Olympics, any Olympics, mean next to nothing. Nothing at all. Less than nothing.

He had to call the youngest of the nine Jansen children and tell him to hang on, because he was putting his dying 27-year-old sister on the line.

Dan swallowed hard and waited. Mike placed the phone gently into his sister’s frail hand. Dan told Jane hello. He asked her how she was doing. He told her how he was doing. She could comprehend, even if she was too weak to speak. Mike watched her face, watched her react, silently, to their baby brother’s words. Then, Mike took back the phone, told Dan to stay put, told him there was nothing else to be done, told him to skate.

“That’s what she wants, too,” Mike said.

Less than three hours later, she was dead.

A dozen family members had driven to Calgary from their home near Milwaukee, in two vans. Half of them climbed into one of the vans Sunday and headed home.

Dan stayed behind, as did two other sisters, Mary and Jan, and a brother, Jim. This was a family that skated together, and stayed together, throughout all the years they had lived in the West Allis neighborhood down the street from the Olympic Ice Arena, at State Fair Park. It was sort of a State Fair family, wholesome and American and clannish in the best sense of the word. Harry Jansen was a retired cop. Two of his children were policemen. Two were firefighters. Four were nurses. One made catalogue sales. One was a member of the U.S. Olympic team.

When Dan came back to Wisconsin last month to compete in the World Sprint Championships, his mother, Gerry Jansen, worked the concession stand. She saw her son win three of the four events, when he wasn’t visiting Jane in the hospital. He was in great shape for Calgary, at least physically.

Four years before, as a teen-ager, he had missed out on an Olympic bronze medal by 16/100ths of a second. That event was the 500 meters, and, when the time came to race at Calgary, Dan stood a decent chance of becoming the first American to win a 1988 medal of any color.

About 4:30 Sunday afternoon, he came striding and gliding onto the Olympic Oval ice. He wore half a wool cap, the bottom half, like a headband, and skated practice laps by himself. For anyone trying to read his face, it looked tired. Sad. Other skaters were breezing, waving to spectators, loosening up. Jansen skated almost forlornly.

His race was the second of the day. One time around the track. One trip, one stopwatch, one time, one chance.

A gun went off once, then twice. A false start, by Jansen. He had to go back, as did Yasushi Kuroiwa of Japan, the other man in Jansen’s heat.

Another gun, another start: Jansen’s left skate had difficulty gripping the ice. He went into the turn. He veered. He went into a slide, and crashed into Kuroiwa, knocking him off his feet.

The teammates who had spent the day trying to support Jansen, to console him, were staggered. “Hard to believe so many bad things can happen in such a short period of time,” Erik Henriksen said, “a time that is supposed to be as wonderful as the Olympics.”

A little more of Dan Jansen had died.

He skated in circles, his head in his hands.

In a small lounge at the arena, he sat quietly with his arm around his fiancee, a Canadian speed skater, and with some of his relatives and in-laws nearby. A long-time acquaintance of the family, Milwaukee Sentinel reporter Catherine Breitenbucher, sat with them, on behalf of those in the Olympic press corps who thought it best not to crowd the 22-year-old skater at such a time. Later she stood on a chair in the press room and told everyone present what he said.

Jansen did want to say something. He wanted first to express his love one last time for his sister, to say how grateful he was that he got a chance to speak with her before her death. He said: “My family and I talked, and they told me again just to do the best I can, and to try to put it out of my mind. That wasn’t an easy thing to do.”

On skating again Thursday in the 1,000 meters, Jansen said: “Right now, it’s not on my mind, but I think I will. I think I can skate.” Funeral services for Jane, the family said, could be held up until Friday if necessary.

When Breitenbucher was finished talking to Jansen, he fell into the arms of everyone else in the room. Asked later how he looked, how he seemed, she said he “looked sort of shell-shocked, like, ‘What else can happen now?’ ”

He wasn’t crying, she said.

But she was.