updated 9:06 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2006

BURBANK, Calif. - Superstitious by nature, speedskater Chad Hedrick recently grabbed the last fortune cookie on the table and cracked it open.

Before reading the slip of paper inside, he posed a question, asking, “How am I going to perform at the Olympics in Torino?”

“It said, ‘Soon you’ll be standing on top of the world,”’ he said Monday night while appearing on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

“I carry this with me everywhere I go.”

Hedrick is the only American who qualified for five events at the Turin Games, giving him a chance to equal Eric Heiden’s record of five golds at one Winter Olympics.

“I’m very confident with my chances,” he said.

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Hedrick’s superstitions carry over to his choice of hotel room numbers.

“I check the three digits and I add them all together,” he said. “For example, 146 — I add it all together and it equals 11. That means I’m going to do well at the competition because it’s all number ones.

“I know it’s crazy, but that’s how I do it. Pretty deep, huh?”

Leno cracked, “So if I wanted to ruin your chances, I could do it with a cookie and a bad hotel room.”

Hedrick’s nickname is “The Exception,” given to him by friend and fellow speedskater Derek Parra.

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“Everything that’s normal, I don’t do,” Hedrick explained. “Everybody that I skate with trains on bikes, probably 60, 80, 100 miles a week. Mine’s been sitting in my living room without pedals for about a year and a half.”

Hedrick’s parents owned roller rinks across his native Texas, where he hung out six to eight hours daily starting when he was 18 months until he was 15.

“I basically learned how to walk on roller skates,” he told Leno. “Instead of hiring a baby sitter, they put skates on me, tightened the wheels, and that’s how I learned how to walk.”

Hedrick switched from inline skating to the ice after the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Within 14 months, he became world champion.

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Making his late-night television debut was easy compared to standing on the starting line.

“This was my first time doing this. There was no expectations,” he said afterward in his dressing room. “But a race is much more difficult. Plus, I’m just confident. I guess if you have some insecurities, you could freak out.”

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