MONTREAL — William Dandjinou was turning heads among short-track speedskating legends long before he started picking up gold medals on the world stage.
Six-time Olympic medallist Charles Hamelin predicted the Montreal product would be gliding past rivals years ago — and was confident Canada's future was in good hands when he retired in 2022.
The two-time reigning national champion is off to a hot start this season with two individual podium-topping performances at a World Tour event in his hometown last weekend. "I'm seeing the evolution of when he started on the national team with me five years ago," said Hamelin, now a part-time coach with Canada's NextGen athletes.
He fell in love with speedskating during the 2006 Turin Olympics. He still has faint memories of seeing himself in African-American long-track star Shani Davis and being inspired by U.S. short-track legend Apolo Ohno. "It was very hard, because I had never experienced such a big disappointment," he said."I almost stopped. I had two weeks where it was during the season and I was supposed to skate, and I just completely stopped skating."
"It gave me motivation to just continue and try to figure out what I really like about skating, and not just the results, because the Olympics just happen once every four years,” Dandjinou said."If you're concentrating on the Olympics every day, and then that doesn't happen. You're like, well, I'm wasting my time.""Sometimes an athlete needs an electroshock," he said.
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