Dan Jansen, 56, can still fit into the Olympic skinsuit he won a gold medal in at Lillehammer
Dan Jansen will not be at the Olympics when they begin in Beijing this week. The last time he did not attend or compete in a Winter Games was at Lake Placid, in 1980. He was 14.
Now he's 56, and his old speedskating skinsuits still fit. That’s because these days he is a personal trainer who often trains alongside his clients. It’s only fitting that Jansen should look far younger than his years, given that he still lives in our hearts as the Heartbreak Kid. That’s what the tabloids tabbed him long ago.
The Olympian scale of his story still has the power to amaze and inspire all these years later. Jansen lost his sister Jane to leukemia only hours before his 500-meter race at the 1988 Calgary Games, where he was among the gold-medal favorites. The world was rooting for him. But he fell and crashed into the barriers. A few days later, at 1000 meters, he fell again.
“There was no blueprint for what I was going through,” Jansen tells Paste BN Sports. “I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing by skating. I knew my sister would want me to skate, but I remember thinking if I won, people would think I don’t even have feelings for my sister. All these things go through your mind on the day you’ve been working toward all these years. It’s a tough thing for a 22-year-old to go through.”
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From Heartbreak Kid to Olympic champion
Jansen had come in fourth in the 500 at the 1984 Sarajevo Games. He would finish fourth again in the 500 at the 1992 Albertville Games (and 26th in the 1000). Lillehammer, in 1994, offered a last shot at Olympic redemption.
Just weeks before the Games, he broke 36 seconds in the 500 on the same ice where he would skate in the Olympics. That was a world record akin to Roger Bannister running history’s first sub-four-minute mile.
Jansen was speedskating’s best male sprinter, with seven overall World Cup titles, but Americans care little about his sport except in Olympic years. Gold in the 500 in Norway seemed like a sure thing — and then he had a slight slip, which is all it takes, and finished an unimaginable eighth.
Now he was left with one more race in his star-crossed Olympic career. You know the rest: Jansen skated to gold and set a world record in the 1000. It remains an indelible moment of Olympic history.
Jansen saluted his sister Jane from the medal stand and held his daughter Jane as he skated a victory lap for the ages. The crowd all but cheered the roof off of Viking Ship Hall. Small wonder: Norwegians know more than a little about speedskating — and about sagas.
Speedskating legend
Jansen’s 1995 memoir, Full Circle, written with Jack McCallum, gives credit to Jim Loehr, Jansen’s sports psychologist, for getting his mind straight for Lillehammer.
“I was destined to go down as one of the greatest speedskaters in history, maybe the greatest in the 500 meters,” Jansen writes in his book. “But to millions of other casual fans, I was either a choker, an Olympic klutz, or, at best, the all-time Heartbreak Kid.”
Jansen compares himself to Joe Btfsplk, the character in the midcentury comic strip Li’l Abner, “who walked around with a rain cloud over his head. Only mine came with five Olympic rings.”
Among the most moving passages in Full Circle is one in which Loehr helps Jansen to see clearly for the first time what had really happened in Calgary:
“Two worlds collided in my life: the world of what should have been the greatest day of my life, the Olympics, and the world of what was the worst day of my life, the death of a sister to whom I had been extremely close. And something inside me simply would not let me experience the happiest day of my life on my saddest one.”
Now Jansen is a personal trainer who puts his clients through physical and mental training all at once, using some of what he learned from Loehr.
“I teach them techniques from breathing to visualization to just mindset,” Jansen says. “We do exercises that require a lot of hand-eye coordination. It might be juggling, it might be back and forth on a balance board, so the brain has to work on three or four different tasks at the same time.”
Jansen likes to work out with his clients. “Sometimes I come home after a day and I’ve done three workouts. I love to stay fit. Even if I wasn’t doing this [for a job], I’d be doing it on my own.”
Jansen lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, and his clients include more than a dozen motorsports drivers, including NASCAR’s Kyle Larson and Tyler Reddick. He also trains golfer Scott McCarron, who plays on the Champions Tour and is Jansen’s age.
“Some of my guys are 19 or 20, and some are older,” he says. “It runs the gamut, and you have to train different people in different ways. It is not a one-size-fits-all program.”
Speaking of fitting, Jansen laughs at the question about his old skinsuit.
“I would look a little different, but I could still get in it, for sure,” he says. “I don’t have quite the lower body that I used to, but I am more fit than the average 56-year-old.”
And more famous. He uses that fame for the Dan Jansen Foundation, which raises money for leukemia research, education, and funding for families. He remembers what it was like for his family in Wisconsin when Jane was getting treatment in Seattle.
“My family didn’t have a lot of money,” he says. “My father was a cop and my mother was a nurse. The foundation’s family-need fund is for nonmedical expenses, like travel, food, and room and board.”
'I love the Olympics and always will'
Soon Jansen will travel to Park City, Utah, where he will see some of the Beijing Games at watch parties with U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee sponsors.
“This will be a different Olympics for me,” he says. “I’ve always been super involved, as a competitor or a commentator. I’ll still be glued to the TV. I love the Olympics and always will.”
Jansen thinks often about the agony and ecstasy of his Olympic career — and of that salute to his sister.
“I remember thinking as the anthem played, ‘Man, this is almost over already.’ And I was thinking about so many things. It was spontaneous when [the anthem] ended to look up and kind of salute her and let her know she was there with me. So it was funny, I got off the podium and did the victory lap with my daughter and went to doping and did the press conference and talked to the president and did all that stuff. And finally I got to see my family.
“And my sisters came in and the first thing they said was, ‘Was that for Jane?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, the race was.’ And they said, ‘No, the salute.’ And I didn’t even know I’d done it until they reminded me. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s nice that you noticed that.’ I didn’t know if anybody did.”
The world did more than notice. It remembers.