Daniel Erwin Jansen

He learned to skate because his sister handed him the assignment.

He was born in West Allis on June 17, 1965, the youngest of nine. Father Harry was a police lieutenant-detective, mother Gerry a nurse; the house sat a block from the outdoor speed-skating oval at State Fair Park. He attended West Allis Central High School. By sixteen he held a junior world record. On February 14, 1988, in Calgary, he told Jane he loved her over the phone. She was twenty-seven and dying of leukemia in West Allis. Hours later she was gone, and he fell in the 500 meters, then in the 1,000. He had won the world sprint title on that same West Allis ice a week earlier.

He kept going. He became the first man to break 36 seconds in the 500 meters and did it four times, yet still had no Olympic medal heading into Lillehammer. The 500 there fell on the sixth anniversary of Jane’s death; he slipped and finished eighth. One race left: he won the 1,000 in a world-record 1:12.43. West Allis later built the country’s indoor oval—the Pettit National Ice Center, where the national team still trains—on the same grounds. Childhood ice was the older outdoor oval a block from home. The city that raised him got the gold and the story.