Shani Davis, America's most important Winter Olympian, reaches his end game

The speedskater has been attacked for skipping the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang. But he has helped transform winter sports in the US

Early last Saturday a group of mostly African American children from a club inspired by the speedskater Shani Davis gathered to watch a woman who had once been in their position competing in the Olympics. Halfway around the world, Maame Biney smiled as she glided to the starting line for her first 1500m heat.

“There she is,” a child shouted from before the television set up at the Fort Dupont Ice Arena. “I see her,” yelled another.

These children in the hallway and Biney, who first learned to skate a decade ago in this same Saturday morning club, are Davis’s legacy. Davis, a five-time African-American Olympian may be competing on Friday for the last time in an Olympics when he races in the 1000m at Pyeongchang’s Gangeung Oval. For many, he is the most controversial American athlete at these Games, the man who refused to attend the opening ceremonies after losing a coin toss to determine the US flag bearer, a decision for which he was called a “disgrace.”

But Davis also is one of the most important Americans at these Olympics, the first black athlete to win an individual gold medal in the Winter Games when he won the 1000m in 2006 in Turin, a feat he repeated four years later in Vancouver. And at the Fort Dupont Ice Pavilion he is a hero.

After Davis made the US team at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, two children in the mostly African American neighborhood near Fort Dupont asked their parents if they could learn speedskating. The parents pushed the rink’s leaders to find time for their kids, finally asking Nathaniel Mills – a three-time Olympian and onetime captain of the US speedskating team – for help. Mills, who grew up in the Washington suburbs and who was finishing law school at Georgetown University, started DC-ICE by convincing the rink’s managers to give him a 7am slot each Saturday.

Soon more kids came and DC-ICE, (the ice stands for Inner City Excitement) became a fixture at the rink which, sits on a small hill and has stunning views of the US Capitol dome and the Washington Monument. Though Davis is from Chicago and trains in Wisconsin and Utah, he is a regular part of the club he inspired, often coming to DC to speak to the skaters or calling in by Skype to offer support.

Anyone who has been part of DC-ICE for any time has a Davis story.

Jean Paul Dias, who learned to skate beside Biney on these Saturday mornings from 2006-2009, remembers the day Davis visited not long after winning his first gold in Turin. Davis handed him the medal, letting him hold it, feeling its immense weight. At that moment, Dias, the son of a Senegalese politician who had spent his early years between Africa and Washington, wanted nothing more than to win one himself.

“He’s just very down to earth,” Dias, now 17 and a coach at DC-ICE, said as the children lined up to watch Biney.

Another coach, Suliman Abdullah, a student at the University of the District of Columbia, remembers the time Davis showed up for a summer event Mills ran at the DC Armory. Rather than wear rollerblades like everyone else, he came in roller skates with four wheels. Everybody laughed.

“I think he’s reserved and more to himself until people get to know him,” Abdullah said. “He’s a nice person, not controversial at all.”

Then he repeated the lesson Davis has given them every time he visits DC-ICE or calls on Skype: “Keep skating and remember the Olympic values: joy, happiness, effort and perseverance.”

Perhaps it might not sound like much, a Saturday morning skating club. DC-ICE has never been huge. Seven am is early on a weekend and there might only be 10 skaters who show up to place the small rubber circles on the rink to form a short-track speedskating course. Southeast DC where, Fort Dupont is located, is a heavily black neighborhood, far removed from the economic boom that has reverberated from downtown and deep into many of the suburbs. The kids who come here come for a chance to try something different, to make themselves special.

Biney and her father Kweku had only recently moved to the US from Ghana when she joined DC-ICE. Abdullah, then barely a teenager, helped her around the track, teaching her to keep her balance and eventually how to crouch and race. Within a few years, she had grown to be fast, hurtling around the ice that Kweku moved her to a daily program in the suburbs. This is what happens to DC-ICE’s best skaters. They reach a point where a Saturday morning club isn’t enough, if they wan to stay in speekskating they need something bigger. But that’s the point of DC-ICE. The idea is to give children who might never have been interested in speedskating, who might never have taken up a sport, a chance to grow.

Dias, who returned to Senegal in 2010, fell out of speedskating in Africa, spending much of his time playing soccer. He moved back to DC last year to finish his final two years of high school in the US and immediately went back to the sport he had missed. His dream of being an Olympian like Davis or Biney was gone but he found the lessons from those Saturdays had remained – the discipline of showing up early, the persistence of trying to beat the older kids in races and the determination to master his craft.

When he went out for football at Washington’s Wilson High last fall the coaches looked at his bulging leg muscles and asked if he had ever played football before. He said no. But he had the perfect football body they said. How had he built it? “Speedskating,” he said, chuckling at the memory.

Mills, the former Olympian who still runs DC-ICE, has been reluctant to speak about Davis during these Olympics. He and Davis are close and he dislikes the way Davis is being portrayed as sullen, petulant and spoiled. This has happened before, at other Olympics and he knows the public image of Davis is wrong, nothing like the man he knows. Years ago, just before Davis won gold in Turin, Mills addressed a different Davis controversy – one in which the skater had said he didn’t want to be a role model: “I’m not walking around on eggshells,” Davis had said.

“[But] that’s his gift, that’s his calling – to connect with youth who are marginalized,’” Mills told me then. “He has deeply, deeply connected with these kids. He’s a humanitarian. He’s someone who can speak to the social injustice and articulate it in ways few athletes dare to do.”

Now as Davis races for what might be the final time in the Olympics, the storyline is wrong. The man who should be an American Olympic hero is still drawing shakes of heads and frustrated grumbles. He has always been a private star, distrustful of the US media, so few know what he means.

But his reach is far bigger than five Olympics and two gold medals. His reach is Maame Biney, a rising American star. His reach is Jean Paul Dias. His reach is Suliman Abdullah. His reach is the little club that still meets every Saturday at the rink on the hill in Southeast DC, where the last word people use to describe Shani Davis is controversial.