Park City speedskater Casey Dawson found himself in the middle of a speedskating revolution. Or in the back, rather. And it paid off for Dawson and the United States, as the Americans won the bronze medal in the Olympic men’s team pursuit event on Tuesday.
Dawson skated at the back of the three-man U.S. team during the B final of the event, as the U.S. knocked off the Netherlands to win its first men’s team pursuit medal since 2010.
The Americans use an unconventional strategy where they leave their lead skater at the front of the three-man team for the entire race and push instead of alternating the lead skater like other teams. The new strategy has worked, as Dawson and company set a world record in the event in December.
And now, at just 21 years old, Dawson is an Olympic medalist. It wasn’t the gold medal that he was likely hoping for, as the Russian Olympic Committee set an Olympic record in the semifinals to upset the U.S., but it would have to do.
However, Dawson came close to not having this experience at all. The Parkite tested positive for COVID-19 in January just weeks before the Games and struggled to obtain the negative tests he required to compete in China. He needed four consecutive negative tests and then the lab that he had been testing at was removed from the list of approved testing centers. Despite recovering from the virus, the tests were still picking up remnants of it in his system.
The first individual event he was supposed to compete in, the 5,000-meter, came and went with Dawson still in the U.S. He was also scheduled to race in the 1,500-meter event just a couple of days later. At that point, he was in a race against time.
By his side were his parents, Mike and Tami Dawson. The frustrations and feelings of helplessness started to kick in.
“Your son feels like the system is against him, and he comes to you and he says, ‘Why are they doing this? Why are they making me take this PCR test if they know that this can happen with PCR tests and there’s another way with antigen tests?’ Mike said. “As a parent, you want to be able to give him an answer and reassure him, and there’s no sane, rational answer to that question.”
Dawson finally got his negative tests and then hopped onto the next possible trip to Beijing. His journey took him from Salt Lake City to Atlanta to Paris and then to Beijing. He made it to China with just hours to spare before the 1,500-meter race.
His parents were getting updates from him the whole time, like photos of what airport he was in and the legroom on his flight or how he was introduced on the plane as an Olympian and how the flight then erupted in applause.
Once he made it to his room, Dawson’s’s coach sent Mike and Tami a picture of him so that they knew he had finally made it to the Games.
“At that point, Tami and I knew that we’ve handed this over, our son is in the hands of people we know,” Mike said. “That was a moment of relief for us.”
One problem: He didn’t have his luggage. More specifically, he didn’t have his skate blades. The Dawsons later figured out that his luggage was lost in transit. Mike had a friend who was “pretty high up” at Delta who got in touch with someone at Air France.
“They essentially put out like an (all-points bulletin) throughout Charles de Gaulle Airport, which is a huge airport,” he said. “They were able to find all three pieces of luggage … and all three pieces were located in different places within the airport.”
Dawson’s luggage showed up in Beijing a few days later, but that wasn’t any use to him in the 1,500-meter event. His coach managed to borrow the blades of Latvian skater Haralds Silovs so that he could at least skate.
Between the jet lag, his missing skates, the lack of practice in Beijing and the pure exhaustion of the prior few days, the 1,500-meter didn’t go the way Dawson had envisioned. He finished 28th of 29 skaters and about six seconds slower than his personal best. Mike likened the situation to Mikaela Shiffrin competing on someone else’s skis without any practice.
“It was evident when Casey was racing that he was unable to skate the way he should skate because he didn’t have confidence in these skates,” he said. “He went to the arena, he did basically a couple of warmup laps and then he toed up to the line.”
But just a week later, back on his usual skating setup, Dawson featured heavily in the team pursuit for the United States. He was part of the team for all three races and was the lead man in that semifinals race against the ROC.
“To see him up there again in the front for the semifinals, it really shows No. 1 how much confidence he has in his own abilities and No. 2 how much confidence the team and the coaches have in him leading out the team,” Mike said. “He realizes that whether he’s up front or whether he’s in the back, he realizes that everybody on that team that’s up there is contributing an equal amount.”
After the loss to the ROC, the Americans ran the risk of missing the podium entirely ahead of a matchup with the Netherlands. Instead, with Joey Mantia in front and Dawson in the back, the U.S. surged past the Dutch by 2.81 seconds to win the bronze medal. The team pursuit was important for all four American men who either skated in the B final or in the preliminary rounds, as it is the first Olympic medal for each of them.
For Mike and Tami, just knowing that their son finally got to have the Olympics experience that he had been dreaming of made the whole ordeal worth it. Knowing that he’ll come back with some hardware to show off makes it even sweeter.
“Our hearts are full, our brains are depleted,” Mike said. “It’s everything and beyond what we expected out of this.”
Added Tami: “After the journey he had, we were just grateful that he was there and able to compete. A bronze medal was just the icing on the cake, for sure.”