Shani Davis, the trailblazing Olympic speed skating champion, said he has retired from competition and gone into coaching.
“It was just enough,” Davis, the 2006 and 2010 Olympic 1000m champion who last competed at the PyeongChang Winter Games, told Dutch broadcaster NOS this weekend. “I had a long career, and there’s other things that I wanted to do with my life.”
Davis, 37, spent recent days coaching at a competition in the Netherlands, wearing a China jacket. He is coaching Chinese junior skaters a little more than two years before the Beijing Winter Games, according to NOS.
Davis ends one of the greatest careers in U.S. Olympic history.
In 2006, he became the first black athlete to win an individual gold medal at a Winter Games in Torino. He repeated as Olympic champion in the 1000m four years later in Vancouver. Davis also earned 1500m silver medals in 2006 and 2010.
His last two Olympics did not go as hoped. Davis finished eighth in the 1000m in Sochi in 2014 as part of a stunning medal-less performance from the U.S. in its historically most successful Winter Games sport.
He then contemplated retirement due to a lack of World Cup success, but endured to make one more Olympic team in 2018. His best finish in PyeongChang was seventh in the 1000m.
Now, he becomes the latest notable name to begin guiding Chinese athletes ahead of the Beijing Winter Games.
Previously, China hired Shaun White‘s former coach, Bud Keene, to guide its snowboarding program, a world champion German to coach bobsledders, a world champion Canadian to coach skeleton sliders, a world champion Swede to coach curlers and Dutch and South Korean coaches in speed skating.
Plus, Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, the male record holder with 13 Winter Olympic medals, and his wife, Belarus’ Darya Domracheva, a six-time medalist, to head its biathlon program.
“Skating will always be my first love, so I’m happy I’m able to stay close to it,” Davis told Dutch media. “It’s not necessary for them to remember me, to need to know me. I did speed skating because I loved speed skating, and the people loved me because I loved speed skating. That’s one of those things. If they know me, great, if not, that’s OK, too.”
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