Remember the April 2008 Vogue Dream Team issue with Apolo Ohno and
Remember the April 2008 Vogue Dream Team issue with Apolo Ohno and Doutzen Kroes? Love it!
Apolo Anton Ohno’s decision to become a world-champion short-track speed skater was made on a remote stretch of coastline in Washington state, in a tiny town called Copalis Beach—”a place you go if you’re in the witness-protection plan,” says Ohno, 25. He was still a teenager, having a difficult time and running with a bad crowd, when, as a dose of tough love, his father left him in a cabin (with provisions) to sort things out alone. Then, as if out of a scene from a Kurosawa film, Ohno began running—and running and running—until something snapped. “From there I just had this burning desire to be the best I can be,” he says, “almost this psychic drive—meaning, I want to win.”
What winning means now—on top of the gold medal he took in the 500 meters at the 2006 Olympics at Turin, and another gold more recently at the 2007 world championships in Milan in the 1,500 meters—is six days a week of the kind of training that would put an elephant to the test: pressing 850 pounds with his legs, for instance. Which would seem like enough for anybody, but then there are plyometrics, for the fast-twitch muscles, and jumping and lots of speed work on dry land. All so that he can go really fast while wearing an outfit that is little more protective than his birthday suit and blades that aren’t called blades for nothing. He readily admits his sport is intense. “I’m pushing my body every day of my life to do what?” he asks. “To compete for four weeks every four years.” On the other hand, he loves it—notwithstanding his brief taste of another kind of glory on Dancing with the Stars, in which he was subjected to only minimal pain by his partner. “There was no actual physical injury,” he says, “although she did kick me in the head a couple of times.”
Doutzen Kroes, whom Ohno is teamed up with here, is the daughter of two competitive speed skaters; before her career in modeling, she tried the sport herself, in the Netherlands, where she competed internationally at the renowned Thialf speed-skating arena in Heerenveen. “Their legs!” she exclaims when asked about the speed-skating physique. “I still have that kind of body. I have strong legs.” But it’s not just her legs she owes to speed skating. You might say that she owes her very existence to the sport, in that one day, while crouched at a speed-skating starting line, the speed-skating man who would one day be her father looked over at the speed-skating woman who would be her mother and winked.
Others in Vogue include Gisele Bundchen & Lebron James and Michael Phelps & Caroline Trentini