U.S. Speedskater Rodriguez Isn't Spinning Her Wheels

Even so, she realizes it's not too late. She dreams of giving speeches in Spanish. She swears that, when she has children, she will speak to them only in Spanish, "if," she said, "I actually ever learn Spanish."

"I'm almost 29," she also said. "It's been seven or eight years since I started [speedskating]. That's not that long. But wow, since then . . . I've grown up.

"Life is so much bigger than speedskating. Eight years ago, I thought life was only speedskating."

In 1997, Rodriguez left Miami for Milwaukee almost blindly, fully aware of neither what she was getting into nor what she was leaving. She found making the transition from in-line skating to speedskating -- which Boutiette, then her boyfriend, had successfully managed before she did -- a nightmarish undertaking. But after wobbling through the first few months in Milwaukee, then U.S. Speedskating's hub, things started to come together. Though relatively small and slight, she had a knack for technique, essential in a sport which calls for unnatural, counterintuitive movements. At the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, she achieved what was considered a stunning fourth place in the 3,000 meters.

"She's one of those skaters, you really can't see them working, they just look so nice," said Derek Parra, a 2002 Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500 who competed with Rodriguez on in-line skates when both were teenagers. "Her whole life, she looked like she was floating a bit."

By 2002, she was achieving podium results regularly. From this new vantage point at the top of her sport, she began to see the world more clearly. The adolescent disregard she had for Miami when she left her home town morphed into an appreciation of the diversity of a place that, according to 2000 census figures, is nearly 66 percent Hispanic. The resounding embrace she received from Miami's Cuban community after two Olympic Games moved her.

After a recent lunch at the Cuban restaurant Sergio's, a longtime family dinner destination in the heart of Cuban Miami, she encountered two men, Max Sanabria and Domingo Ceballos, who recognized her, saying they were friends of a distant cousin. "She lives close to Alaska someplace," one of them said to the other. She told them she was working out for a few weeks at her parents' home. "Where do you train -- in a refrigerator?" the other said.

Rodriguez has enjoyed such opportunities to reconnect with -- and more deeply immerse herself in -- the culture of her home town. She now says she would like to move to Miami when her competitive career is over. She has recently talked with developers and investors about a plan to build a winter sports complex with facilities for speedskating, hockey and figure skating in South Florida.

"I appreciate Miami so much more now that I've moved away," she said. "Nowhere else has such a mix of culture, languages, foods and music. We're really such a melting pot. I really miss that where I am."

For years, it never occurred to Rodriguez that she could mine the distinctiveness of her place of birth and her background. As a school girl, she knew her father was Cuban and her mother, an American-born Bostonian, but little else about her family's story. Her friends, many 100 percent Hispanic, jokingly called her a Cuban Cracker. Her father, however, did not volunteer information about his past. She did not think to press the subject.

Jennifer sat in absolute silence on a recent morning, saying not a word as her father -- in response to a single question about his decision not to speak Spanish to Jennifer and her younger brother, Eric -- launched into an animated and occasionally emotional 20-minute personal history. He spilled details of the difficulties he endured when he arrived in Miami from Cuba with his sister at age 13. When his parents finally made it over three years later, his mother walked off the boat and blindly past him, failing to recognize her only son. He had, by that time, unofficially changed his name. He became Joe when a school teacher declared that she could not pronounce his given name: Emilio.

"To my surprise, we were not welcome," Joe Rodriguez said. Other kids "called us all kinds of names. They would come by the house and throw eggs at you. We were really treated like they didn't want us."

Of course, things were better than they had been in Cuba. Joe recalled his Uncle Pepe being seized from his grandmother's house and thrown into jail for buying a few pounds of meat on the black market. There was a cousin, Enrique, who Joe said was a '64 Olympian in judo, who had the crest ripped off his military uniform by Cuban leader Fidel Castro after daring to telephone the United States from the Summer Games in Tokyo. That cousin, he said, spent the rest of his life selling candy in the street.

After attending college at the University of Florida, Joe married Barbara and started a graphic design business in Miami. Like all parents, he wanted his children to have a better life. Speaking Spanish, it seemed at the time, could only be a handicap. In one breath, Rodriguez jokes that she could "kill him" for his silence. In another, she said, she now understands.

"When my dad came over, it was tough," Jennifer Rodriguez said. "If you didn't speak English, you got in fights. The struggles he went through, he didn't want us to have to deal with that."

Parra, who in 2002 became the first Mexican American to win a Winter Olympic gold medal, also grew up speaking only English because of similar circumstances at home. Parra and Rodriguez used to exchange rudimentary Spanish phrases -- all each of them could muster -- when they saw each other at competitions.

"Now, we're all kicking ourselves in the butt," Parra said. "It's a gift to be bilingual nowadays."

It's a gift Rodriguez intends to seize by force in the coming months.

"I just know how important it is," she said, "whether it's going to be for the Olympics or life in general."