Canadian speed skating not quite back on track despite 2 Olympic medals
Ted-Jan Bloemen wins gold and silver, but women held off podium for second straight Olympics
Thank goodness for Ted-Jan Bloemen.
Canada's long track speed skating team had medal hopes coming into the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. But after 19 athletes competed in 14 different events over more than two weeks, the 31-year-old Dutch transplant is the only Canadian going home with any hardware.
Bloemen, who moved to Calgary in 2014 and became a Canadian citizen, is the story of these Games for Canadian speed skating, taking home a silver medal in the men's 5,000-metre and gold in the grueling 10,000.
His story, if you haven't heard it, is fast becoming the stuff of Canadian Olympic lore. Born in the Netherlands, he failed to make the powerhouse Dutch team in 2014, so a dejected Bloemen moved to Canada and claimed citizenship through his New Brunswick-born father.
He credits the move for rejuvenating his career, and four years later he's a Canadian Olympic hero.
"I'm so proud," he told the CBC after his gold-medal win. "I have such a great team around me, I'm so grateful for them [and] I wouldn't want it any other way."
The Canadian program is doubtless happy to have him, too, as his medal haul represents Canada's entire long track total from these Games. It was a similar story four years ago, too, when Denny Morrison earned a bronze and a silver in Sochi. That's a far cry from what the Canadian program has won in past Games, peaking with eight medals in Turin and then five in Vancouver.
Long track speed skating is Canada's most successful winter Olympic sport — so it may come as a surprise to Canadians who perhaps tune in only every four years and still remember stars like Cindy Klassen, Clara Hughes and Catriona Le May Doan — but the Canadian program has actually been in something of a holding pattern since Vancouver.
While there were some encouraging performances at these Games, it's far from certain that the program has turned the corner and is back on track to winning ways.
Women held off podium, again
Canadian women have now been kept off the podium for two Games in a row. Ivanie Blondin, 27, was a hopeful in some of the middle distances and the mass start, but ultimately came home empty handed.
Likewise, 23-year-old Vincent de Haitre was a dark horse in the 1,000 and 1,500, but fell short of his expectations, partly due to an injury he suffered before the Olympics. Jordan Belchos, 28, set a personal best in the race that Bloemen won, but he also came in fifth.
Add it all up, and the program comes away from South Korea well below its past level of glory. As four-time medallist Kristina Groves put it, "On the whole, it's kind of a downer."
Part of Canada's problem, Groves said, is it just don't have the same pool of talent to draw from that, for example, the Dutch do.
Speed skating is something of a national obsession in the Netherlands, and virtually every child enrolled in sports will give it a shot, she notes. "We don't have the Dutch conveyor belt of young skaters," Groves said. "That's why they have 20-year-olds coming into their first Olympics and winning."
Bloemen himself was brought up in the Dutch system, but never qualified for its Olympic team. Now he's a gold medallist and double world-record holder.
Groves thinks Bloemen's two medals could not only help the team when it comes to receiving funding from Own The Podium and other programs, but also inspire others around him to raise the bar.
Early in her own career, Groves said she and other Canadians were normally just happy to be competing on the World Cup circuit, never mind striving for podium finishes like the Germans and Dutch. Then world-class talents like Hughes and Klassen came along with a different attitude.
"They were like, screw that, I'm going to win," Groves said. "That was a game changer for me."
Soon she was training alongside the best skaters in the world, and that pulled her performance up to a higher level, too. She won two silvers in Turin and two more medals in Vancouver.
With a record-setting talent like Bloemen at the top, perhaps that can happen again. Groves singles out 22-year-old Isabelle Weidemann of Calgary in particular as being someone to watch. Weidemann finished sixth in the 5,000 and seventh in the 3,000 in Pyeongchang, but Groves sees a lot to like in her future.
"She's a beast on the bike," Groves laughs. "She's still developing, but she's got a lot of potential I would say."
Back on track?
Time will tell whether the seeds of Pyeongchang will bear fruits for the program down the road, but the good news is there's another country whose comeback story Canada can learn from.
The tiny Scandinavian nation of Norway has been heralded for its sporting prowess, winning more medals than anyone at these Games despite their tiny population. But less well known is that the Norwegians are only now coming out of their own two-decade hiatus in speed skating. Prior to these Games, no Norwegian had won a gold on the oval since 1998.
But they've rejigged their program with a view to more podium finishes, and after two weeks in South Korea, Norway came away with four speed skating medals — beating their medal haul from the last four Olympics put together.
And a Canadian is deserving of at least some of the credit. Former sprint skater Jeremy Wotherspoon became the coach of Norway's sprint team in the lead-up to these Games. "Two years before I joined the Norwegian team, they had started to develop a new sprinting program," he told the CBC. "And so when I took over there was the beginnings of it and I was able to just continue it and shift it a bit based on my philosophies and ideas about sprint training."
Wotherspoon's experience in Norway goes to show that, sometimes, the right person is just waiting for the right opportunity to step up. Like Havard Lorentzen, who just won gold in the 500 and silver in the 1,000.
"We got some of these guys at the right time and it's been great to see them improve and see their belief in themselves grow," Wotherspoon said.
"Last season was the first full season I was with them and you could see by the end of the season they were like 'OK, we are real sprinters now. We have a chance. Anything is possible.'"
The same could be true of Canada. There's no easy answer, to be sure, but Groves says the good news is that there's always a path out of the darkness, even if you can't always see it.
"There's always a path, but you need the right combination of skaters, coaches and timing," she said.
"I lucked out with the timing," she said, "but they have the right people in place to do it."