Broken Home, Broken Back, but Skating Still

A Mother's Love Sustains Leveille

TURIN, Italy, Feb. 7 -- Somehow, sweet memories remain from those days. Before U.S. Olympic speedskater Ryan Cox broke his back, and after his mother had endured a bitter divorce, the two spent weekends cleaning mobile homes in Dawsonville, Ga., at $25 a shot. His mother already was working two jobs, one as a cashier at Home Depot, but there wasn't enough money to go around. Cindy Leveille remembers the surge of panic she felt when she saw just $500 in her bank account.

So she and her son, then 16 and a promising in-line skater, put on jeans and old shirts and took brooms and mops and buckets and rubber gloves, and they holed themselves up in other people's bathrooms and kitchens every Saturday wondering how they had gotten to that point. Sometimes the heartbreaking hilarity of the scene would hit them, and they would have to rest on their broomsticks, laughing so hard they cried.

"I think we held each other together," he said. "I don't think I held her together any more than she held me together."

Five years later, in a Gainesville, Ga., courthouse, Charles Ryan Cox legally changed his name to Charles Ryan Leveille (Lev-ee-AY). His mother stood by his side, tears streaming down her face, when he explained to a judge why he wished to give up his father's surname to take her maiden name, determined to show how much he appreciated her sacrifices in the most powerful way he could.

"I did it to honor her for everything she's done for me," he said of that day last May. "She's the strongest woman I've ever met. . . . She got me through everything."

"The judge," Cindy Leveille said, "was blown away."

When her son found out he made his first Olympic team, in team pursuit, during a closed-door meeting on Dec. 31 in Salt Lake City, he asked a roomful of U.S. Speedskating officials if they could please, for just one minute, hold that thought. Then he hastily dialed his mother's number, whispered the good news (which elicited a scream) and hung up.

There would be no such call to his father, Jimmy Wayne Cox. The two lost touch soon after the divorce in the spring of 2000.

"My dad faded out of my life," said Leveille, now 22. "He didn't support me or my skating career. . . . He's kind of gone off the face of the earth."

Cox, a dental technician in Marietta, heard of his son's name change through his daughter Jennifer, who has kept her old name and still sees her father occasionally. During a recent interview, his voice choked with sobs, he said it "broke his heart" to learn of his son's feelings about him. He said he decided to stay home from the Olympics because he feared he would be a distraction.

"I'd love to go to Turin but I'm afraid it would, if he knew I was there, take away from his performance," he said. "I'm about to cry now because I would love to be there but I don't think it would be good for him.

"There's no way in the world -- I'm pretty emotional -- I wouldn't want to hurt his chances at all. . . . I am so proud of Ryan. I don't know how even to say how proud I am. . . . I love him and want to see the best for him no matter what went on."