THE OLYMPICS WINTER GAMES AT ALBERTVILLE : She’s Still Neat : Bonnie Blair Is a Star These Days, but Her Head Isn’t in the Clouds

Have gold and bronze medals from the 1988 Winter Olympics, two visits to the White House, endorsement contracts with three major companies and about as much fame and fortune as any speedskater can expect spoiled Bonnie Blair?

Judge for yourself while reading the transcript of a recent interview with Blair about her second visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to attend a state dinner for Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1988:

“I had an escort guy pick me up. He was in some sort of the services or something, the Marines, I think. And he said when he first picked me up: ‘I’ll have you know you’re dining with the President this evening.’

“I just kind of turned to him, and it was like, ‘Of the United States?’ I mean, I knew that’s where I was going, but I didn’t think I’d actually be at his table. I thought I’d be off somewhere else.

“But, after the dinner was over with, and we were going into another room, George Bush came up to me. He was Vice President at that point. He said: ‘You know, I saw you just kind of looking around the room,’ which I remembered I did during the dinner, just kind of trying to take it all in.

“He said to me: ‘You know, sometimes I do that exact same thing.’ And he said: ‘I just can’t believe I’m here, either.’ I thought that was really neat.”

Four years after Bonnie Blair emerged as an Olympic heroine and the pride of Champaign, Ill., in the Winter Olympics of Calgary, winning one-third of the United States’ six medals, she remains much the same as she was then. Unaffected, unpretentious and, to borrow one of her favorite words, neat.

As one Midwestern columnist wrote, she is “the kid sister of all America . . . as genuine as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich . . . unscarred by sophistication.” Her biography in the U.S. International Speedskating Assn.’s media guide reveals that she enjoys “softball, golf, writing letters, watching TV and baking cookies.”

If there is any difference in Blair then and now, it is that now, at 27, she is an even better speedskater than she was in 1988, when she won the gold medal in the 500 meters, the bronze in the 1,000 and finished fourth in the 1,500.

On the World Cup circuit this winter, she is undefeated in the 500 and the 1,000, and even she acknowledges that she should be favored to win medals, perhaps even golds, in both. She also is leaning toward entering the 1,500, in which she is a potential medalist.

“I look at her like some kind of speedskating goddess,” says her teammate, Mary Docter. Such praise once was reserved in women’s speedskating for East Germans, who won 19 of 27 medals available in the last two Winter Olympics. But since reunification, the former East Germans, although still formidable, are hardly invincible.

“They’re off the juice,” U.S. Coach Peter Mueller said recently, referring to anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs that the East German speedskaters are alleged to have used to great advantage in training. Most U.S. speedskaters echo his opinion, but Blair does not rush to judgment.

Asked if she believes the competition is more fair now that the Germans are vigilant in testing for drugs, she said: “You’d like to think it was fair to begin with. I’m in there when we’re doing drug testing, and other girls are going in there, too. I guess we’ll never really know the answers to that.”

Blair was the first female sprinter in the last decade who was capable of challenging the East Germans, but she never considered them rivals. When one of her fiercest competitors, Christa Rothenburger Luding, gave birth last year, Blair sent her a baby gift.

“The East Germans, the eastern part of what the Germans are now, probably aren’t as strong all the time as they used to be,” she said. “But there’s also some positive things.

“Being able to see them with their parents or their spouses, who are able to come to different competitions, that’s pretty neat. They have more smiles than they used to. They can come and go without feeling they’re being watched.

“They can come and sit at a table without having someone come up and whisper in their ear, ‘Hey, it’s time to leave. You’ve been here 10 minutes.’ They’re definitely more free and that, to me, is exciting to see.”

Can this be the same woman Mueller calls “a killer” on the track?

“When you get someone down, you have to destroy them; don’t let them back up,” he said. “Bonnie is a killer. She gets them down and keeps them there.”

Blair may not be a born speedskater, but she is close. On the day of her birth in Cornwall, N.Y., her father, Charlie, dropped off her mother at the hospital, then hurried off to a speedskating meet to see three of his five other children compete. He learned that he had a sixth child when Bonnie’s arrival was announced over the public address system at the track.

Two years later, the family laced on the smallest pair of skates it could find over her shoes so that they would fit and sent her onto the track. She was competing by the time she was 4, although she sometimes would enter the preliminaries and have to miss the final because it interfered with her afternoon nap.

“I felt I was in the 7-and-under division forever,” she said.

Like most U.S. speedskaters, Blair began competing on a short track, which also is known as pack skating because as many as six athletes are racing on the 110-meter oval at the same time. First one across the finish line wins.

Blair was good but not great because of her small size, which made it difficult for her to elbow her way into the front against larger competitors, and although she prefers short-track skating, an Olympic medal sport for the first time here, she still does not have the physical stature at 5 feet 5 and 130 pounds to excel as she does on the long track.

In the long-track event, in which two skaters start at the same time in separate lanes on a 400-meter oval and race against the clock, she has been outstanding from the beginning, qualifying for the national team at 16 in 1979, her first major competition. She almost made the Olympic team in 1980, and, in 1984, she finished eighth in the 500 meters in the Winter Games at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia.

But it was not until 1986, when she tied Luding for second place in the 500 in the World Sprint Championships, that she began to realize she had Olympic medal potential.

“Until then, I was lazy about training,” she said. “If I had something else I wanted to do, I did it.”

In 1989, she wanted to try college, enrolling at Montana Tech, near one of the United States’ three oval speedskating tracks at Butte. That did not prevent her from becoming the first U.S. woman to win the World Sprint Championships in 10 years. One year later, in 1990, she finished second.

Last season, however, her season was interrupted when U.S. speedskaters were ordered home from the European World Cup circuit because of the threat of terrorism connected with the Persian Gulf War. Later, she suffered from bronchitis and finished a disappointing fifth in the World Sprint Championships.

“Doing other things in the years between the Olympics was good both as a break and because it helped me realize that I didn’t want to look back and go ‘What if?’ about 1992,” she said.

Her friends say she has never been more motivated.

“You can almost see the fire in her eyes,” said her boyfriend, U.S. speedskater David Cruikshank. “Every race for her is all out, hold nothing back, do the very best you can every time. If something happens bad, she just seizes it and makes it positive.”

There have been down times since 1988. Her father died on Christmas in 1989 of lung cancer, and a 36-year-old brother, Rob, is still battling an inoperable brain tumor that was discovered before she skated at Calgary. But she said that the shared trials have made the family even closer than it was before. Forty-two of her family members will be at Albertville to see her skate.

She also has strong support from Champaign, where the Patrolman’s Benevolent Assn. raised money through raffles and the sale of bumper stickers that identified her as the police department’s favorite speeder, to support her training until after the 1988 Winter Games.

For a speedskater, she has done well financially since then, signing sponsorship agreements through the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Except for Champaign and Butte, she can still walk down the street in any U.S. city without being recognized. “I think the problem is that we wear those hooded Lycra suits when we compete,” she said. Nevertheless, she is famous in other countries, particularly The Netherlands, where speedskating is almost as popular as soccer.

Two summers ago, a Dutch couple visiting the Midwest found her mother’s home in Champaign and knocked on the door.

“They said they wanted to see the house where Bonnie Blair lives,” she said. “My brother let them in and showed them the house. They had some tea and left.

“Obviously, my mom was pretty taken by it, just to imagine that someone would go to that length to find out where you live. That’s mind-boggling. It’s probably nothing for Michael Jordan. Probably a lot of people want to drive by his house and see where he lives. But you don’t think of that for a speedskater. It just doesn’t seem to fit.”

But it was, she said, neat.