21 minute read
Fire & Ice
Off the ice, speed skater Maame Biney is an effervescent 21-year-old, but on it, she transforms into an apex predator. Now, with her eyes on Beijing, she’s ready to unleash all of her superpowers.
Words TRACY ROSS Photography ROBERT SNOW
Biney admits to having an alter ego that comes out in competition. Her name is Anna Digger.
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or as long as Kweku Biney can remember, his daughter, Maame, has had one of the most robust laughs of anyone he’s ever met. Take the morning he brought her to his office in Reston, Virginia. As he proudly presented her to his boss, 17-month-old Maame started laughing. “But it was a big laugh,” says Kweku, “and my boss was like, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’”
That was 2001, and according to The Story of Maame, she’s been laughing ever since. She’s also a world-class short-track speed skater, the only Black female one in the United States. In 2018, she became the first Black woman in history to race short track for the United States at a Winter Olympics, which she did in Pyeongchang, South Korea. And come this February, if all goes well, she’ll head to China to compete again in the Games.
According to people who know the nuts and bolts of speed skating, Biney’s style is unconventional. “Up until recently, the trend in skating has always been about being as light and slender as possible, about having good body position, and about being as technically sound as possible,” says Simon Cho, one of Biney’s coaches. “But Maame gets her success from her raw power. That’s what makes her an exceptional skater.”
Case in point: When she was 5 years old, Kweku enrolled her in a figure skating class at a rink near their home. Little Maame had no idea what skating was, nor had she ever stepped on ice. But she immediately took to it. The hitch: After a few lessons, Maame’s instructors found that she was too fast for figure skating, so they directed her into speed skating. Kweku enrolled her in a class, she fell in love, and soon she was competing and winning races.
Eleven years later, in 2017, she won a bronze in the World Junior Short Track Speed Skating Championships. Less than a year later, she was invited to the Winter Olympic team trials. She won the 500-meter event, qualifying for the Games. That’s when the collective sports media pricked up its ears and descended upon her, not only because of her preternatural speed and strength on the ice, but because she was a Black speed skater with so much preternatural speed and strength.
As soon as the interviews started, The Laugh made its appearance. In every segment, it bursts out of Biney’s body. At times it seems to come unbidden, overshadowing whatever else she might hope to convey. By the time she was practicing for Pyeongchang, it had appeared in more than a dozen interviews, including ones with CNN, NBC and People. It was so uplifting, so effervescent, so ever-present that some interviewers started calling more attention to her laugh than her incredible skating.
A CNN story from February 2018 describes Biney as having “a power that belies her youth” and as being “America’s best hope for a medal in the 500 meters.” But it later said: “Maame’s greatest contribution to Team USA isn’t necessarily her athleticism. It may be her smile…Her positivity is boundless. Late last year, a Belgian skater’s 17½inch blade snapped, flew into her face and ripped into her lip and chin, requiring stitches. But Maame didn’t dwell on that. She took to Instagram. ‘Who won? You guys should see the blade,’ she posted.”
But as beloved as she was becoming for her giggle, something dwelt beneath that winning smile and self-effacing personality. It was a hidden entity, a source of immeasurable power. It had an identity, too, and its name was Anna Digger. Anna was capable of turning the smiling, giggling Maame into a menace on the ice. In Pyeongchang in 2018, Anna was still developing. But Anna has since fully emerged, and in advance of the next Games, she’s giving Maame the tools she needs to unleash her superpowers.
“Maame gets her success from her raw power,” says coach Simon Cho.
The laugh that made Kweku’s boss’s head turn? It happened in 2001. Young Maame was still living in Ghana; her mother (Kweku’s then wife) had brought her to Virginia to visit Kweku. Biney says she remembers exactly one thing about her life in Ghana: a birthday party her mother threw for her at her hair salon. After that, the story gets cloudy; her parents divorced, but Kweku still wanted to see his daughter. So in 2006, Kweku bought 5-year-old Maame a plane ticket and had a trusted friend bring her to the U.S. from Ghana.
When Maame got off the plane? Disaster. She started crying and told Kweku she wanted to go home. They got in the car and started driving, and twice more she repeated her wish. Each time, Kweku calmed her by saying, “Okay, we can do that,” but in his head, he was thinking, Oh my god, what did I get myself into? Looking for a diversion to ease Maame, he took her to a JCPenney store and let her run up and down the aisles. When she saw all of the shelves filled with pretty things, she cheered up, and the following morning, upon waking, she said, “Daddy, I’m not going back.”
Kweku hints that life back in Ghana wasn’t great for his daughter, including living with her mother. About that, Biney says, “I don’t have a close relationship with my mom, so I can’t say anything other than, ‘She’s my mom.’” It seems so much more could be said about the subject, but that would dampen the mood. And like Biney told CNN in 2018, “I love having people smile and laugh because if you’re smiling and laughing, then that means you’re happy, and being happy…is the best present you can ever give to anyone every single day.”
She’s right. A happy story elevates others. So, let’s return to her first year on the ice, just after she’d transitioned to speed skating. On her first day, her coach complimented her bright purple snow bibs. That made her happy. She wanted to come back.
At the time, the Bineys lived in Somerville, Virginia, an hour-long car ride from Washington, D.C. Youth ice hockey has a rabid following, and as a result, rink time is hard to get. The 5- and 6-year-olds on Maame’s team had to arrive at 5:30 a.m., be ready to skate by 6. For Maame and Kweku that meant leaving home at 4:30 a.m. But Maame loved skating, and Kweku was committed. Never mind that he was a brand-new single parent navigating caring for a 5-year-old in a new country and staying financially afloat. One morning, he was so beat that when his alarm went off, he rolled over and hit snooze. But soon he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Maame, saying, “It’s time to go, Daddy, let’s go.”
Biney’s exuberant laugh has been an integral part of her personality since she was a toddler.
Known for her preternatural speed and strength on the ice, Biney is readying herself for her second Winter Olympics.
“Okay, Maame, okay,” he replied, although he sure could have used some extra sleep.
The following is not confirmable; sometimes our psyches are working unbeknownst to us. But it could be that Anna Digger was already starting to emerge in Maame. What 5-year-old have you ever met who cares as much about one thing (except maybe candy) as Maame did about skating? What made her tiptoe across the carpet in the pre-dawn dark and wake her sleeping father? Fortunately, Kweku was up for it. He hauled himself out of bed and drove Maame to another practice.
A theme of their life would soon emerge: Kweku would do anything to make Maame happy. That meant taking her to DC-ICE and sitting in the chilly rink while she skated. Then he’d drive her back home and do it again the next week. His commitment paid off when the club organized a competition. It just so happened that the owners of a club much closer to home were watching, and when they saw Maame skate, they asked Kweku if she could join them. She skated with them for the next five years, and she was in the minority. “You didn’t see many Black kids,” says Kweku. “Mainly it was white people and Koreans.” But soon, people were taking notice of Maame’s potential.
“I heard about Maame when she was an up-and-coming skater,” says Simon Cho, who raced in the same region, went to the Olympics in 2010 and won a gold medal in the 5,000-meter relay. “People were saying she was a very talented athlete and an unconventional short track skater.” In 2009, the club attended a national competition in Midland, Michigan, and Kweku let his daughter go, figuring, “It was time for her try things out.”
But at the same time Biney was starting to find her place in the world, she was also encountering racism. “It was hard,” says Kweku. “There are certain things I don’t want to tell you. But it got to a point where there were some young girls who wouldn’t even talk to her. It was bad. It was sad. I just encouraged her, ‘Hang in there.’ It was rough. But she did hang in, and I told her, ‘Don’t worry, just go do your skating. Just go home. When you get on the ice in the competition, you’ll beat them all.’”
She did as Kweku told her, but something was forming in her subconscious. At age eight, she created her first email address and formed the alias “Anna Digger.”
“I did it because I was very suspicious of everyone, and I didn’t want people to know my real name,” Biney says. It was already getting harder for her to keep her head down, to “just skate,” so it would make sense that she’d want anonymity. It was a way to hide, to protect herself. And continue the formation of an alternate identity.
The ups and downs continued when she joined yet another team.
Biney stayed positive. The Laugh was there. But no matter how much joy she poured into the world, the racists continued to hound her.
In one of the crueler examples that Kweku recounts to me, her club changed speed suits on the evening before a race, and no one told Kweku. “We showed up at the rink on competition day and everyone was wearing a new suit while Maame wore an old suit,” he says. “It was heartbreaking. They should have told me. Let me make the decisions. They didn’t tell me. It’s all part of the racism.”
With Kweku’s deep commitment, God’s love, some amazing supporters and her innate athleticism, however, Biney’s star kept rising. But her habit became hiding it. “She wouldn’t tell nobody what she was doing. Even the school didn’t know. The only time they knew was the first time I went there to ask for permission to take her out to competition,” says Kweku.
She soldiered on, downplaying her successes as well as her struggles. A t this point, you know more about Maame Biney than most people— the hard parts as well as the happy ones. During our relatively brief interactions, we barely scratched the surface of her life, and then, just when I was starting to plumb the twists and turns of her life, poof! It was threequarters of the way through last October, and she was off to compete in the first World Cup speed skating event of the season. Understandably, it was tough to dig deeper after that because she was in China and then Japan and then France, and the results of the four total events and the U.S. Olympic Trials would determine who Team USA would send to Beijing.
But still, it’s obvious there’s genuine struggle lurking within this inspiring story. And aren’t the most impactful stories about the highest-achieving athletes the ones that show both their successes and their tribulations? Didn’t Simone Biles win over millions of new fans by boldly stating why she pulled out of most of her gymnastics events last summer in Tokyo? Those are pretty easy questions. Here’s a tougher one: Should elite athletes bare their souls to draw in more fans?
Or maybe they should just focus on the positive. Let’s go with that for a while longer. Biney competed at a national level through junior high and high school, and other skaters admired her. Kamryn Lute, her current teammate, has known her for more than a decade. They competed on the same team, and Lute says, “Ever since I was young, I’ve known Maame as a great leader and an older sister. But when she really got my attention was when she was going to the Junior World Championships and making the national team. Even to this day, when I watch her at practice, it’s so impressive to see how much power she has and how much speed she can build so quickly in the 500 meters. And just being around her at practice is always super enjoyable. She never has a bad attitude. She’s always fun, and she makes others want to enjoy their time there even though it’s hard.”
Competing at a higher level, though, meant getting to races was even harder.
Speed skating is a wildly expensive sport and Kweku struggled to pay. “But throughout this whole process, God was with us,” he says, because somehow the money always materialized. Maame realized how lucky they were and gave back unbelievable skating. In 2016, she was racing to qualify for the Junior National Team and broke her ankle. There was one other race that day, but Kweku encouraged her to sit it out: “You fell, that’s okay. You can do this next year,” he said. “But no, she wanted to skate. She came back the following morning and did two races and won first place in both. With a broken ankle, she qualified to represent the U.S. Junior National Team. I was like, Oh my god. What is this girl?”
If that doesn’t blow you away, Simon Cho adds, “If I were to describe speed skating, it would be physical torture. Someone at Maame’s level spends 15 to 17 hours a week on ice.” Their training grounds—ice arenas—don’t exactly excite the senses. Speed skaters travel in one direction only: counterclockwise. Imagine the cold, the monotony. And when they stop, Cho says, the lactic acid buildup in their legs can burn like fire, and it can feel like they’re walking around with cement blocks on their feet. “Yet with Maame there’s no negativity, no moaning and groaning about stuff she doesn’t want to do, even drills she doesn’t enjoy,” Cho says. “She’s a very good listener and takes the hard work in stride. She always gives 110 percent of what she’s got. That’s part of what makes her a champion.”
It’s also what won her a bronze at the World Junior Short Track Speed Skating Championships, on her 17th birthday, in 2017. And it earned her gold in the same event at the U.S. Speedskating Short Track World Cup Qualifier the same year. The latter brought a non-
In 2016, Biney qualified for the U.S. junior national team—while competing with a broken ankle.
According to Team USA coach Stephen Gough, Biney is “a speed demon in the 500 meters.”
negotiable move to Salt Lake City, so she could train with the U.S. senior speed skating team at the Utah Olympic Oval ice skating rink.
Biney says that up until she started training in Utah, it had never clicked that she was something special. She might have missed it in her attempt at continuing to keep her head down, avoid sharing too much, turn her gaze outward. She was still the Maame of pure positivity and support for her fellow teammates, just as she was still blitzing off the starting line with her unbelievable speed and power.
But something else was about to reveal itself, too. It had been there all along; Biney had just never acknowledged it. Or rather her: Anna Digger. One day she told a teammate about her and how she’d conjured Anna Digger when she was 8. She was just a kid then, protecting herself from others. And it never occurred to her that Anna could somehow empower her. But her friend loved Anna’s existence and said, “She could be your alter ego!”
It was a joke at first, says Biney, but it caught on. “I guess it makes sense, too, because of how I am off the ice. When we’re not doing practice, I’m all chitchat. And before I do a race, I’m ‘Oh, shit.’ I’m still scared, I’m trembling in my boots. But when I race, I’m not a happy, laughing Maame. My eyes go blank and I’m very serious. So we were talking about that before the Olympics, and [making Anna Digger my alter ego] became a thing.”
When Maame conjures Anna, she is not a human but a black panther out on the hunt. “The thing I imagine is the eyes, you know, how they look when they’re going out to catch their prey. The prey is, like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m scared; oh, shit, I’m gonna die.’” On the ice, “Anna is fierce. She’s just going to do what she’s got to do to win.”
When you watch Biney race, you can see the transformation. Before she begins, she’s a bundle of nerves. But when she gets to the starting line, her eyes fix not downward, like some of her competitors, but forward, in the direction of her target. When the gun goes off, she’s an explosion of kinetic power that barrels down the ice. Her Team USA coach, Stephen Gough, calls her “pure speed, a speed demon in the 500 meters,” and on her best days, she skates with a controlled ferocity not visible in her competition. But once the race is over, the animal vanishes and the smiling, fist-pumping Maame is back.
Maybe because Anna was so newly realized, or maybe because Biney was so nervous about competing in Pyeongchang, she didn’t do well back in 2018. She skated with the pack for the first six laps of the quarterfinal of the 500 meters, but crashed and failed to finish.
Afterward, NBC host Megyn Kelly asked Biney about her life story, her relationship with Kweku, how she was learning to handle stress (meditation) and anxiety (breathing exercises), and about Anna Digger. Nervously, but with her smile on full display, Biney said, “Oh, she’s my alter ego. She’s the fierce one. Unfortunately, yesterday she wasn’t out there because I was on the big stage. But hopefully on Saturday [during my next race], she’ll be there and just ready to kick some boootiiiiee!”
Her second race went just as poorly. But in the face of the failures, Biney still charmed millions. Which is how it should have worked; Anna might have scared them. Eventually, the lights went down on the closing ceremonies, and Biney went back to Salt Lake City and to training. And Anna was about to show up in a whole new way.
In 2018, U.S. Speedskating hired a new short track coach, Wilma Boomstra, after the men’s and women’s teams had a disappointing showing in Pyeongchang. Already known for her bold and brutally honest personality, “she quickly became a lightning rod,” reported The Washington Post. A total of eight skaters—one of them was Biney—related their experiences to
To help Biney train, Red Bull commissioned a custom suit and sensors that create an avatar of her body. The visual record of her movements helps her correct her position for optimal speed on the ice.
the newspaper in 2020; some said Boomstra was a disruptive force and often insulting. They alleged she used inappropriate language and dished out demanding practices in a punitive manner. In the end, U.S. Speedskating wound up fielding three complaints.
“In an athlete’s life, there are for sure ups and downs…but in the 15 or 16 years I’ve skated, I’ve never felt like actual shit, like this coach hates me,” Biney tells me. “Even if a [past] coach was 100 percent racist, they wanted me to be better. Not saying [Boomstra] was a racist—but I do think she didn’t have my best interest at heart. I dealt with it because I thought I was the only one feeling like that. [It went on for] three years until…I realized I wasn’t the only one and I should say something and try to communicate how I felt.”
To do that, she had to summon a stronger, more emotionally powerful and more unflinching version of herself. “Honestly toward the end,” she says, “I think Anna came out and stood up for herself, and I stood up for myself— saying enough is enough.”
In March 2021, U.S. Speedskating fired Boomstra. N ow, as Maame/Anna prepares to compete this February in China, she’s getting even more tools to help her unleash her full power, both mentally and physically.
In early October, Red Bull commissioned a custom suit and skates equipped with Batman-like tech. The skates have a pressure sensor in each heel, and the suit has sensors that go up both sides of Biney’s body. When she pushes down on a heel sensor, it activates lights on the body sensors, and a digital skeleton is created. The team who built it—from a design firm that specializes in large-scale art fabrication, architecture design build, and experience design—then assigns an avatar to the digital skeleton and records the movements. Biney can watch on a computer as her avatar skates exactly as she just did on the ice.
The goal, says creator James Barlow, is to help her see how certain body positions—a shoulder rotation, for instance—impact her speed. Barlow also put a sensor strip on the suit’s spine, so she could see how her torso was laying out in a turn (it should be as horizontal to the ice as possible). She could see her hip rotation, as well as how much pressure she was applying to each skate. She did a counterclockwise lap, and the lights on her right side went immediately red—indicating substantial pressure— while the lights on her left side, which showed the pressure she was applying on her left skate, turned yellow and green (not as optimal).
Cho says Biney has “one of the strongest, if not the strongest right leg out of all the girls that are skating right now.” Now the coach and she can see exactly where her strengths and weaknesses are. There appears to be a new threshold for how strong Maame Biney can be.
The past 18 months haven’t been easy for Biney. She’s nursing a knee injury, Kweku’s health hasn’t been top-notch, and, with COVID-19, neither she nor the rest of the team has been able to train or race as much as they’d like to. Nonetheless, Biney is feeling optimistic about the future (naturally). She’s more connected to Anna Digger than ever, which has led to her speaking out more on things like racism and Black Lives Matter. She’s becoming more attuned to her skating, in part thanks to the suit, but more so because of Stephen Gough’s coaching and new techniques she’s incorporating into her training.
She also recently helped the U.S. women’s 3,000-meter relay team shatter the American record by almost three seconds on the last day of the Short Track Speedskating World Cup in October. This February, she’ll go to Beijing and skate her heart out, drawing on the power of Anna Digger.
But even if she fails to bring home a medal in Beijing, Maame is still smiling Maame. Her tireless positivity keeps her going, win or lose. Maame and Anna are the same person. Full of optimism. Full of ferocity. Full of possibility.
In October, Biney helped the U.S. women’s 3,000-meter relay team smash the American record. She hopes to bring that energy to Beijing.
