Davis, Shani

Shani Davis, (born August 13, 1982, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American speed skater who was the first African American athlete to win an individual Winter Olympics gold medal.

Davis learned to roller-skate at age two and a year later was skating so fast that he had to be slowed by the rink’s skate guards. He switched to ice skating at age six, a few months before his mother enrolled him in a local speed-skating club. Soon thereafter Davis began to win regional competitions. At age 17 he moved to Marquette, Michigan, to improve his training opportunities. Although Davis was tall (1.88 metres [6 feet 2 inches]) for a speed skater, his talent quickly overcame this apparent disadvantage, and he qualified for both the U.S. short-track and long-track teams for the 1999 junior world championships.

In 2005 Davis became the fourth American and the first African American athlete to win the world all-around speed-skating championship. On February 18, 2006, he skated a 26.60-second final lap to win the men’s 1,000-metre long-track final at the Winter Olympic Games in Turin, Italy. Three days later he captured the silver medal in the 1,500 metres. Davis’s success continued at the 2006 world speed-skating championships, where he won a second all-around title, posting a world-record overall score of 145.742 points. He also broke the world record for the 1,500 metres, adding that to the 1,000-metre record he had set in November 2005. In 2009 Davis won the world speed-skating sprint championship, becoming the second man (after Eric Heiden) to win both all-around and sprint world championships over the course of his career. At the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, Davis became the first man to win back-to-back 1,000-metre speed-skating gold medals. He also won a silver medal in the 1,500-metre race at the Vancouver Olympics.

Davis took home a bronze medal and a silver medal, respectively, at the 2011 and 2014 sprint world championships. At the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, he—like the rest of the U.S. speed-skating team—underperformed, with a personal-best finish of eighth place in the 1,000-metre race. He participated in the 1,000-metre and 1,500-metre events at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in P’yŏngch’ang, South Korea, but failed to medal in either race. In 2019 he retired from competitive skating and began a coaching career.