the dutch to hedrick: 'boooo'

thanks to reader K- who sends me this link to a TimesSelect article. Bottom line? The Dutch think Hedrick is a tool.
...

Fans in the Know Give Their Cheers to Shani Davis
By HARVEY ARATON
TURIN, Italy
IN the continuing and increasingly acidic case of Chad Hedrick versus Shani Davis, the unofficial Dutch court of speedskating arbitration reached a verdict last night.
Davis: innocent of the charges levied by Hedrick, that he was a disloyal and even unpatriotic teammate.
Hedrick: guilty of being the self-promoting, ugly American of the 2006 Winter Olympics.
"When Hedrick comes around, we say nothing, but when Shani comes, we stand up and yell," said Krista Wander, a fan from the formidable Dutch contingent, before Davis bumped Hedrick to third from second in the 1,500 meters and precipitated a series of stunning contrasts between the two American skaters.
Davis said the silver was special and warmly congratulated the surprise Italian gold medalist, Enrico Fabris. Hedrick, the five-gold hope who has won just one with one race to go, said he considered the bronze a bust and stoically went through the medal-ceremony motions.
In a riveting news conference without Fabris, who was attending to drug-testing matters, Davis chided American journalists for creating a Shaq-and-Kobe scenario and said it was doing the sport no good. Hedrick bought into the belief that Tonya-and-Nancy elevated figure skating to unprecedented levels of popularity in the mid-1990's, and so might Chad-and-Shani.
Hedrick revealed his intentions to eventually become a movie star. Davis said, "I'm not a phony person; no way I'll ever be a Hollywood actor."
At which point a pretense of civility evaporated, with Davis responding to a reporter's request to shake hands with Hedrick by castigating Hedrick for not congratulating him Saturday after he became the first black athlete to win a Winter Olympics gold medal in an individual event (he won the 1,000 meters). Then Davis bolted for the door,
muttering, "I don't want to hear what he has to say; he wants to shake my hand when I lose."
Alone, Hedrick repeated his assertion that Davis "betrayed" him and the United States team by not competing in the team pursuit — a relay race — to focus on the 1,000.
On the scale of American bad vibes here, Bode Miller has been a mountain rumor compared to Davis and Hedrick, Lindsey Jacobellis a flawed snowflake on a snowboard. To date, the Italian police haven't staged any late-night raids on American athletes that would risk the renaming of every pasta dish in the Congressional cafeteria. But the Davis-Hedrick feud — one with at least the sniff of a racial subtext — has put a cloud over one of the rare American success stories in Turin.
My e-mail messages from the United States have been running a polarized 50-50 since I wrote Sunday that Davis was justified in his decision to tolerate no distractions while preparing for what may have been his one chance to win the race he has been dreaming of since he began skating at the age of 6. But in the most boisterous Little Amsterdam section of an oval that has been swarmed by orange-clad Dutch fans since the start of the Games, a sampling of opinion was unanimous for Davis.
"If you are winning the gold, then you are doing the right thing, because how many Olympics can you count on being the favorite?" Gert Jan Verrips said. His friend Eric de Beer added: "You see here, Davis and Hedrick are two new guys at the Olympics. You look back to four years ago, with Derek Parra, and where is he now?"
Parra, the American who won the 1,500 meters in 2002, was 19th last night, on his way to a farewell race next month in the Netherlands, the country where, as he said, "you have the most knowledgeable fans."
If my informal Dutch poll wasn't enough to warrant a consensus, consider that Davis's mother, Cherie, was spotted in an orange jacket and a cap with "Holland" stitched across the front outside the news conference, while inside several Dutch fans heckled Hedrick until they were ordered to leave.
Why the antipathy for Hedrick from people known for their unfailing cheeriness, their support for all skaters, when attending a sport that is deeply ingrained in their culture? It's all in the perceived agenda. Marian Van den Berg, another Dutch fan, said, "He wants to be famous, you can see that."
And at the root of the conflict is Davis's belief that Hedrick has been attempting to swift boat him here at the Olympics, use him as a prop as he wraps himself, Texas-style, in the flag, for the purpose of increasing his commercial appeal, while claiming that the feud has elevated their skating and is good for the sport.
Davis, for his part, countered by reminding us that the short-track controversy between the Americans and the South Koreans in Salt Lake City was a made-for-Olympics mess that ultimately accomplished nothing on the commercial front.
"It's not a heavyweight boxing fight," he said, unwilling to play Joe Frazier to Hedrick's Muhammad Ali.
That matches the purist Dutch mentality. "Shani to us seems like he is racing for the love of skating," Sietze de Vries said in Little Amsterdam.
So they all cheered when Hedrick's time, short of Fabris's, was posted, and again when Davis, skating in the final heat, bested Hedrick by nine-hundredths of a second, nudging their own skater, Simon Kuipers, off the podium.
No matter. They could forgive. They could forget. "We love you, you beat Hedrick," a Dutch fan called out to Davis, on his way to the news conference where Hedrick was waiting to begin the next round.