Hello speed skating enthusiasts,
Welcome back to the column for another World Cup
recap. Once again, instead of going through it all event by event, I’ll just
speak to a few of the biggest storylines that I saw at this World Cup. In the
interest of not making this too long, I’ll leave a lot of our usual trackers,
lists, and updates for another column. Please bear with me for my conspiracy
theory rant—I promise the other storylines are much shorter.
World Cup 4 Storylines
Blowing - A “Conspiracy Theory” In The
Making
For anyone tuning in to check the men’s B Group 5000m
times before the World Cup 4 stream had even started, it was super obvious just
how fast ice was going to be this weekend. Guys were skating under 6.20 and not
even cracking the top 15 in B Group, an absolutely insane bar to meet. The
winner broke 6.10, nine guys went under 6.15 and 10 of the top 13 men PB’d. As
one league organizer put it bluntly: “these times used to fucking mean
something.”
So why were things so fast? For anyone that saw a
video of the starter’s flag, it’s pretty clear that winds were blowing at least
25km/hr.
Inside a fucking building.
That’s kinda weird, ain’t it? It
seems that the Milwaukee operations crew had the fans and vents blowing as hard
as possible.
Does this really matter? There’s a somewhat fair argument
that everyone races in the same conditions and so it shouldn’t matter. I don’t
hate that argument, and I see why someone might think it’s valid, but I definitely
don’t agree with it.
Let’s start by talking about world records. In other
sports, like track, wind assisted world records don’t count. Conditions have to
be somewhat comparable day to day and venue to venue for records to mean
something. If a world record had been broken this weekend and it had counted,
what’s to stop Joy Beune or Patrick Roest or any of the top Dutch skaters from
blasting the fans in Heerenveen and taking down some world records themselves?
Why not be the first man under 6 minutes, even if it’s assisted? This is the
kind of record hunting we’re better off avoiding and not something that should
become part of the sport. Let’s leave the fastest races to the fastest racers,
and not to the strongest facility air distribution systems.
And it’s not just world records. Time standards really
do mean something when qualifying for World Cups and for seeding to start the
season. Times even mean something for starting the year in A Group, and anyone
coming from a slower oval could actually lose their A Group spot to start a
World Cup season just because skaters are going faster in other parts of the
world (this is written into the ISU World Cup bulletin). So there is some
legitimate incentive for countries to post fast times at trials. Allowing ovals
to blast their fans would make this process less and less fair.
There’s also a lot of reasons to not allow this because
of the potential for cheating or manipulation. Let’s start with a more innocent
example. Maybe you tell your country’s coaches that you’ll blast the fans at a
home World Cup that no one else is expecting to be fast. Let’s imagine that
this year most skaters tapered slightly for the World Cup in Calgary because,
being the only World Cup at altitude, they assumed that this would be the
fastest weekend and the best chance to earn a time spot at World Champs. But then
let’s say the Americans actually had their skating programs built around the Milwaukee
World Cup because the organizers told them that they would make the times artificially
fast by blasting the fans. Would that kind of insider knowledge be unfair? Let’s
say the times indeed ended up being faster in Milwaukee than in Calgary and an
American beat out another skater (that they lost to the rest of the season) for
a time spot. This type of advantage could clearly not just have implication on
getting skaters better time standards to get onto the World Cup circuit, but could
even affect the qualification process for Worlds.
That’s a relatively mild and ultimately unlikely
example of why it’s bad to allow the fans to be on. It’s completely possible that
a skating federation could just outright cheat by turning the fans up or down
for certain races or events. 3000m, 5000m, and 10,000m races are impacted the
most by huge whirlwinds and fan-assisted times and, being the longest races,
they also pose the easiest opportunity to tamper with the intensity of the fans
for different pairs. It’s pretty easy to imagine the fans being turned down for
the last pair of a 10,000m in which the host country already has someone in a
podium spot and they’re willing to do everything in their power to keep that
skater on the podium.
It's also not just the longer races in which this
could happen. If there was ever a case where the host country happened to have
two skaters in the final pair and those two skaters had really good races (let’s
say like a track record, a gold medal, and a PB) and the oval obviously had the
fans blasting, is it possible that the fans were turned up a bit extra just for that one race? Would
any country stoop that low? This is obviously a hypothetical situation.
Figure 1: A non-suspicious selection of home-ice
skaters with PB’s or TR’s.
Sucking - A Big Canadian Mess
After a very bad pair of races, both the Canadian men’s
and women’s team pursuits are headed to B Group. The girls are now out of a
rank spot to get into World Champs but hold onto the only time spot by about a
second over the Italian team led by a very dangerous looking Lollobrigida. For
the Canadian girls, missing the podium for a second straight World Cup is
pretty insane.* Getting beat by Germany somehow hurts even more. I’ve heard these
girls wanted the World Record in the TP, but they are moving in the wrong
direction at lightening speed.
The men are in an even worse spot as they sit outside
of both types of quota spots and need to close a multi-second gap on some
historically bad European teams (Belgium and France) if they want a shot to defend
their World Champs medal in March. Things are not looking great for them by any
measure.
As I saw the team pursuits unfold this weekend, I
thought to myself “things literally cannot get any worse than this.” Looks like
I spoke too soon! Just 2 hours late, the two Canadian girls are taking each
other out in the mass start. Now, I’ll be honest, I didn’t see a great angle of
the fall and so it was hard to say which of the two was more to blame for the
crash. But I’m not here to point fingers—I’m just here to say that a terribly embarrassing
day somehow got even worse. It takes a special kind of talent for that to
happen.
*The Canadian women’s TP hadn’t missed a
podium since 2018 and the last time they missed two podiums in a row was way
back in 2017. They have NEVER skated a B Division race before, so World Cup 6
in Heerenveen will be quite historical. And keep in mind these are the same
three girls who went undefeated at the World Cups from 2020-2023, while winning
Olympic Gold along the way – by far the most dominant and impressive stretch within
speed skating’s recent history.
Speaking Of Mass Start, What The Hell Is Going
On??
While we’re on the subject of mass start, can we just take
a moment to acknowledge how weird this mass start season has been? It was only
a year ago that three women won a mass start on a break away and we all thought
“wow, how refreshing to not see the same 5 girls battle it out in a sprint
finish for the millionth time in a row!”
We thought we were going to get a new, exciting mix of
races, but instead we got stuck with loads and loads of skaters that you’ve
never heard of landing on the podium because no one is willing to sacrifice
themselves to close a gap on the break. I was hard on Jorrit last week, and I
have to admit he did his job much better this week. But seeing a 39-year-old
man drag a nobody from Belgium to his second World Cup medal in a row while an
even less relevant French skater (and I’m not talking about Loubineaud) picks
up a surprise bronze medal was pretty crazy.
So here is what I’m asking the gods* for: please,
before I die, give me one more epic sprint finish with all of the top 10 guys just
gunning it in that final lap. Please let me know that this type of mass start
finish isn’t quite dead…
*not to be confused with “God”, the man
that Anders points to after every race.
Mass Start: By The Numbers
To illustrate how crazy the mass start is this season,
I’ve put together a couple of numbers. Keep in mind the mass start season is
more than half over already, so these numbers clearly aren’t just a one-off.
Number of podiums for Belgian
skaters:
Bart Swings: 1 (an obvious
shitter)
Indra Medard: 2 (a
Belgian hero)
Number of MS medals won
by Canada: 2
Number of MS medals won
by France: 3
List of skaters who
individually have more medals than Giovannini, Wenger and Chung combined, but
probably shouldn’t:
Michelle Uhrig, Indra Medard,
Wenjing Jin, Fridtjof Petzold, Binyu Yang, Greta Myers, Mattieu Belloir,
Timothy Loubineaud
Teams with both skaters
in the top 6 in either the men’s or women’s mass start:
China, Italy, Belgium,
USA
Teams without two skaters
in the top six in either the men’s or women’s mass start:
Canada, Netherlands,
Japan
You Are Worse At Drafting Than A Literal Bot
Here’s the good news: Drafting is easier than it
looks! The bad news? Your team is evidence of what NOT to do.
Long story short, we only had 39 teams sign up to play
this season. So, we ended up with one dummy team which we drafted using a list
from another sports betting website that uses a different points system than we
do. The plan was for this team to help keep the pools balanced at 8 teams each
and prevent one pool from getting a bunch of really easy picks in the later
rounds, but since this team was drafted off a list from a different game, the
team would probably end up around the middle of the pack. Hmmm. This team is “Ben’s”
team, which is currently in second place and just won World Cup 4. This means
that all of us, except for Thomas, are currently losing to what is essentially
a bot. All those hours and hours of studying and list-making clearly did not
pay off!
Stolz Gets Beat By Large Asian Man
It finally happened—Stolz got beat. But it wasn’t by Jenning
de Boo, who had recently been testing Stolz the most. Nor was it Kjeld Nuis,
who gave it to Stolz for 1100m before getting smacked in the final lap of his
1500m. Nor was it Peder Kongshaug, who was the last skater to take Stolz down
in either a 500m, 1000m, or 1500m back in December 2023 and has been skating
out of his mind recently. Nor was it Larry, a fan favourite. Instead, it was
Tatsuya Shinhama, the enormous Japanese sprinter with a claim to fame for being
not only large but also the (sometimes forgotten) 4
th
fastest 500m
skater of all time. As one avid speed skating follower made of iron once put
it: “damn, I didn’t know they made them that big”.
Young Italian Men Love Divorced Americans
I completely forgot about this one, but someone
reminded me on the weekend that Daniele di Stefano and Mia Manganello were
hooking up last year. I definitely thought that Mia, whose last name changes
almost every season, would have started this year as Mia di Stefano. I guess I
was wrong. Shucks. Sorry guys.
I think that’s all I’ve got for today. I’ll be back
soon with an update to the
Injury and Free Agent Trackers
as well as a
look at how
Dad’s Lads
and
The Leftovers
are doing compared to
your dogshit teams.
We’ve got ourselves a bit of a break before racing resumes
on Friday, February 21, with World Cup 5 in Poland. Plenty of time to make some
changes to your rosters and think about a clever free agent pickup!
Cheers,
Dad