Winter Olympics: Keith Duggan watched Shani Davis make Winter Olympic history on Saturday.

It is not only on the pristine Alpine slopes that you are sometimes blinded by an overwhelming sense of whiteness in Turin. The Winter Olympics may bring all the nations of the world together but when all is said and done, they are the white man's pleasure pursuit.

That is unlikely to change because of events in Turin around tea-time on Saturday when Shani Davis became the first black athlete to claim gold in the history of the shivery Olympics.

No black winter athlete had featured on the podium until Calgary in 1988, when figure-skater Debbie Thomas finished third in free skating.

Vonetta Flowers did win gold as brakeman on the American two-man bobsled in 2002 but Davis is the first to become champion of an individual sport.

Davis was regarded as a favourite in the men's 1,000 metres race and duly swept to success in a time of 1.08.89, a full second outside his own world record but nonetheless a comfortable skate to the prime position on the Torino medal podium. The nature of distance skating, where 21 pairs race and the skater who posts the fastest time wins, means that it is not the most thrilling of events.

But to see Davis racing among a white field and in the Oval Lingotto arena filled almost exclusively by white European and American fans was to be reminded that these winter pursuits have a strong race and class dimension.

That is what makes Davis's emergence as one of the world's pre-eminent speed skaters so contentious.

Raised in the poverty stricken south-side of Chicago in the 1980s Davis was no different than any other black kid of his generation in that basketball star Michael Jordan was his god. But he had plans to emulate MJ's Olympic prowess in different ways. As a child, Davis liked to burn off surfeit energy by tearing around his neighbourhood roller rink at such cavalier speeds that he was regularly thrown off by attendants. By the time he was directed to an ice rink, he had already roughly patented a strong, relentless style that would make him such a formidable racer at 1,000 metres grade.

"Maybe I can become the Michael Jordan of speed skating," he joked on Saturday night.

But the truth about Davis is he is not interested in becoming an inspiration for black America and was indifferent to the historic implications of becoming the first black person to win gold since the Winter Olympics were formulated in 1920.

"I guess you make of it what you want. I just think it is cool to win gold because a lot of people train all their lives and end up with nothing, regardless of their colour."

But Davis's skin colour has been an issue in what was a controversial week. Brought up in single-parent household by Cherie Davis, his de facto coach and manager, the skater has always been at loggerheads with his national skating association. He travelled to Salt Lake in 2002 as an alternate or substitute on the short-skating team amidst suspicions his team-mates Anton Ohno Apollo and Rusty Smith had permitted him to win a qualifying race. He had become so alienated from the governing body of American skating that he asked for his biography to be stricken from its promotional book.

This week, he alienated most of his team-mates by flatly refusing to participate in the team pursuit on Friday. His absence greatly weakened the American effort and meant Chad Hedrick, the Texan wunderkind who was less than gracious about Davis last night, was denied another Olympic medal.

"I am not a team player," Davis explained after Saturday night's race.

"The team pursuit was the day before the 1,000 metres. So it is silly. People do what is best for them. I had the opportunity to win here and I was focused on that. You have to ask Chad if he would have run the team pursuit if it was the day before the 5,000."

Davis's blatantly singular stance has polarised opinion, with some former Olympians sympathising with the Chicago man despite the tension he has created within his squad.

"If he feels it is him against the rest of the world, that's because he pitched it this way," complained his team-mate, Casey Fitzrandolph, a Wisconsin athlete who lists his hobbies as hunting and following the stock markets and whose father Jeff sits on the board of directors of the US Speedskating Association.

Of course, Davis's decision to skate for himself alone prompted a deluge of opinions from patriots back home.

"People saying they hoped that I would fall, that I would break my leg and some using the n-word," Davis reflected.

Hedrick, who will go head-to-head against Davis again later on in the week was tight-lipped about his his team-mates gold: "He skated very fast tonight. That is all I can say." Davis laughed when he heard about that terse comment from a supposed team-mate. "Well, at least he said I skated fast!"

However, Davis found more effusive support from Erbin Wennemars, the Dutch man who finished in bronze position and who embraced the American afterwards, to thunderous applause from the boisterous Netherlands fans.

"He is now an Olympic champion and a fantastic sportsman. So I think he was right."

And you can be pretty sure Michael Jordan would agree with that.