Hello speed skating enthusiasts,
The Olympics is all done, and what a fucking show it
was. Upsets in almost every distance kept things interesting while a healthy
haul of Canadian medals had most managers on this website smiling right to the
very end. Unfortunately, the show is all over. And even more unfortunate is the
fact that I’m well behind on my writing. But you obviously knew this already
since you’ve been eagerly refreshing Dad’s Column daily, having left it open on your phone
browser desperate for more content and wondering when the hell a new column
would finally appear. Well, I finally found time to finish off a column that I
started weeks ago. So, whether you want to relive some of those Olympic events
or not, that’s what you’ll be getting for the next post or two.
Before I jump into it, I guess I gotta give a shoutout
to Stepdad for pinch hitting on the column in my absence, even if it also took
him like two fucking weeks to get something posted. And I can’t imagine he has a
valid excuse for his lethargic effort since he doesn’t even work at the (very
busy) communism factory. Who knew how well this communism shit sold in Alberta? Though,
to be entirely fair, the only workplace that might be even busier right now is
the separatism factory, which makes Stepdad’s absence a little bit interesting.
And suspicious. But that’s neither here nor there, so let’s get back to our
2026 Olympic recap.
Women’s 5000m
After the crossover drama of the men’s 1000m, the
crowd was riled up for another spicy show. Though there weren’t any DQs in this
one, spectators were blessed with one of the best women’s 5000m events that
I’ve personally ever seen.
The first big pair came in pair four (out of six) with
Merel Conijn and Sandrine Tas slugging it out. Tas has a shocking lead for most
of the race and was still half a second ahead heading into the last lap, but
Conijn’s very strong finish (with what was ultimately the fastest last lap of
the entire field) pushed her just ahead of Tas by 0.2 seconds at the end of
5000m. In the next pair, Ragne Wiklund was well out in front of the leading
times but a spectacular blowup at the end of the race had her drop from around
32.00s to a 33.6. She somehow managed to land with a final time right in
that very narrow 0.2 second gap between Conijn and Tas, putting her in second
place with one pair to go. Wiklund’s blowup was reminiscent of last year when
she led the 5000m at Worlds for most of the race but lost it right at the very
end. Her performance confirms yet again that Wiklund is surely the world’s best
4600m skater but somehow always manages to struggle in that twelfth and final
lap (though, to her credit, still never nearly as badly as Melissa Wijfje
struggled with that last lap).
The final pair was Lollobrigida, coming off a
phenomenal victory in the 3000m a few days before, and Sablikova, who was
trying to protect a 19-year medal streak at Worlds/Olympics. Lollobrigida
paced herself just off of Wiklund’s pace for most of the race, sitting in
second from lap 4 to 11. Despite her splits staying relatively flat for most of
the race, staying between 32.0 and 32.5, she dropped slightly to
a 32.7 in the second last lap of the race and it looked like things might just
barely slip out of her hands. But she channeled some sort of inner mom power,
or possible she was motived by the >$200,000 USD prize awaiting her from the
Italian Olympic Committee if she won another gold medal, and she negative split
nearly a full second in the last lap and clutched the win by a measly 0.1
seconds.
Had Lollobrigida skated a flat final lap of the race,
or even only managed to negative split half a second (which still would have
been impressive as hell), she would have missed the podium entirely. This is
how close things got in the Women’s 5000m. Sandrine Tas was only 0.30 seconds
back from gold in the women’s longest distance and yet she missed the podium
entirely as Conijn and Wiklund landed in the silver and bronze positions. Since
I’m writing this so late and so we’ve already seen some of the margins of
victory in the sprint distances (such as Femke Kok’s 0.66 second lead in the
500m), the narrow gap between the top four competitors in this 5000m feels even
more incredible.
On a sad note, Sablikova missed this podium. She was
sick at the Olympics and had to scratch the 3000m on the first day of racing.
She clearly wasn’t fully ready for this race but, being her last race of her
last Olympics before she retires later in March, I’m not surprised she went to
the line to race and embrace the moment. Her streak of World Champs/Olympic
podiums ends after 19 amazing years, stretching from 2007 (Finn Sonnekalb’s
birth year!) to the 2025 World Championships last season in Hamar. She’s one of
the all-time greats and it’s a bloody shame we didn’t get to see a healthy and
tapered Sablikova one last time before she hangs up the skates.
Men’s 10,000m
After his disappointing 4
th
place finish in
the men’s 5000m, Davide Ghiotto went into this race with a vengeance. He got a
bronze in the 10,000m at the 2022 Olympics and had won all three World
Championship 10,000 races since then, so he went into this event as one of the
clear favourites.
Though, what Ghiotto wasn’t (and which he didn’t
realize he needed to be until it was too late) was either a geriatric with a
mullet or a young eastern European lad. Unfortunately (for him), Ghiotto is
clearly neither, and thus he was destined to miss the 10,000 podium at these
Olympics. Metodej Jilek, forever known as “the Czech Kid”, won the event in
decisive fashion, leading from lap 17 right to the end and ultimately finishing
over 5 seconds ahead of the next best skater.
In second place was Vladimir Semirunniy of Poland, who
had landed on the 10,000m podium at Worlds last year in his first season
skating for Poland after transferring over from Russia. He narrowly beat out
the bronze medal finisher, the legendary Jorrit Bergsma (who, at 40 years old,
is pretty much the same age as the gold and silver medal finishers combined).
Bergsma had first medalled in this event at World
Champs nearly 15 years ago and won the gold at the Sochi Olympics. Skipping
over his very successful World Cup and World Championship career (cause I don’t
have time to write 5000 more words), he added an Olympic 10,000m silver medal
to his trophy cabinet in Pyeongchang in 2018. After placing 4
th
at
the 2022 Games, Bergsma redeemed himself and completed his 10,000m Olympic medal set
with this bronze medal here in Milan. What a legendary last Olympics from the
ageless mulleted Dutchman.
I’ll also give a quick shoutout to Viktor Hald Thorup got
called up as the first reserve and who then proceeded to skate a pretty bad 15
laps and then just give up with 10 laps to go. Congrats buddy, what an Olympic
effort.
Men’s 500m
As always seems to be the case these days, the men’s
500m was a short but fantastic event. Fewer distances can claim to have as many
favourites for a medal: Stolz, de Boo, Zurek, Kim, Koshkin, Morishige,
Dubreuil, Kania, Gao, Shinhama… the list goes on and on.
In the first pair, Ignaz Gschwenter set the tone early
with a 36.07. This would prove to be the worst time of the day, which is
surprising to no one because Ignaz shouldn’t have even been there in the first place
(Philip Due Schmidt is rolling in his grave rn). After the Ignaz embarrassment,
the real show started.
The first 8 pairs were par for the course, except for
maybe when Zhiwen Lian went to the start line and got booed by the largely
Dutch crowd in very unsportsmanlike and un-Olympic-spirit like fashion. All
because he purposefully messed up one of their Dutch skaters’ races in the
1000m so that his fellow Chinaman could land on the podium. Jeez guys, it was
one bad crossover, give it a rest.
It wasn’t until pair 9 that the big boys came to play.
In that pair, Shinhama and Kania faced off and finished with a pair of 34.4s
with Shinhama barely besting his Polish competitor. In the next pair, Laurent
Dubreuil ripped a 34.26, an Olympic record and two full tenths ahead of the
very competitive skaters in the previous race. Despite going into the race
ranked 15
th
in the world (by far his worst world rank in years),
Larry had put himself in a great spot with five dreadfully long pairs to go.
Knowing how many of the coming skaters had been beating Larry all season and
taking note of his Olympic record time, the crowd in the building now
anticipated the floodgates to open and incredible times to start raining down
from the final 10 skaters.
Though, as the next few pairs went, Larry was able
to hold off many of the top contenders: Gao, Kim, and Koshkin all came in well
behind him (0.2-0.4 back). And then, in pair 13, we had the showdown that we
had crossed our fingers for all season: Jordan Stolz and Jenning de Boo. Coming
off the 1000m race, many people thought de Boo had a good chance at beating out
Stolz since he had been much stronger over the first 600m of that race. But Stolz
managed to prove once again that betting against him is often a fool’s game. He
was ahead of de Boo right from the opener and managed to hold the lead right to
the finish with an insane time of 33.77—one of the fastest 500m races of all
time. De Boo wasn’t too far behind with a blistering 33.88, but it just wasn’t
enough that day to take down the American phenom. The former Olympic record of
34.32 had officially been shattered by 0.65 seconds.
With Stolz and de Boo well out in front, it was now a
race for bronze with two pairs to go. In the penultimate pair, Zurek finished
within a tenth of a second of Larry but couldn’t quite catch him. Zurek was
generally considered the biggest favourite to podium alongside Stolz and de
Boo, so once Larry held him off his chances at a podium suddenly felt very
real. The final pair crossed the line in an underwhelming 10
th
and
13
th
place, leaving Larry third on the scoreboard and the proud
winner of his first Olympic 500m medal.
For those that don’t remember 2022, Larry went into
that Olympic 500m race as the favourite for the gold. After a suspicious false
start was called on him, he missed the podium by only 0.03 seconds, finishing 4
th
.
A few days later, he then got redemption in the 1000m where he won a silver
medal despite going into that event with much lower odds of landing on the
podium. To see Larry clutch out a 500m medal four years later after one of his
toughest World Cup seasons in a while was super cool to witness in person.
I also feel like it’s important to mention that Zurek
finished in 4
th
place, matching his finish in the 1000m. As a
favourite to podium in both events, this must have stung quite a bit. I’ll also
mention that his teammate, Piotr Michalski, finished 5
th
in the 500m
at the last Olympics as well as 4
th
in the 1000m. Both of them
coming so close two Olympics in a row is clear evidence that Poland is a cursed
country.
Women’s 500m
Going into the Olympics, I don’t think there was an
easier bet on a medal than Femke Kok gold in the women’s 500m. She was undefeated
on the circuit all season and had won every World Single Distance Championship
500m since the last Olympics. Kok ended up winning the gold yet again (not a
surprise) but what was much more eye opening was the margin that she won by.
Going into her race, the Olympic record was 36.94
(held by the legendary Nao Kodaira). Despite no one else going sub-37 seconds, Kok
smashed this record by nearly half a second with a final time of 36.49. The margin
between Kok and second place was 0.66 seconds. We all thought the gap in the
men’s 500m between Stolz/de Boo and the rest of the field was big, but this one was on another level.
In second place was Jutta Leerdam, who had beat Kok in
the 1000m a few days before. Rounding out the podium was also the same bronze
medalist as in the 1000m, Miho Takagi. Takagi was a bit of a surprise entry as
the Japanese federation had originally listed Kurumi Inagawa on their 500m
entry list, but who did not race. Mommy Miho doesn’t generally skate the
500m on the World Cup circuit but seeing her on the podium at a championship
event shouldn’t be too shocking. Let’s not forget that she also medalled in the
500m at the last Olympics and is the defending sprint world champion from 2024.
Just because she doesn’t skate this event regularly doesn’t mean she isn’t incredibly
competitive in it.
Missing the podium by only 0.03 seconds was Italy’s
Serena Pergher, a remarkable achievement for the young Italian skater. Her lap
was the third fastest of the field, even beating Miho’s lap. She’s never podiumed
before, so to come as close as she did to an Olympic podium is pretty
incredible. I don’t know what they were feeding the Italians going into these
Olympics, but it clearly worked.
There were definitely a few notable misses in this
event, with the most obvious one being the defending Olympic champion Erin
Jackson who ended up in 5
th
. Not a bad result by any measure, but
surely lower than she had hoped for. Some people are suggesting that one of her
springs came off a bit before her race which, if true, could have affected her.
Either way, she had a solid race but it just wasn’t enough given the quality of
her competition. Other disappointments include Yukino Yoshida, Kim Min-Sun, Lee
Na-Hyun, Anna Boersma, and a bunch of other skaters that were drafted to a lot
of teams. These skaters all finished at least half a second back from the podium
and most didn’t even crack the top 10, earning their managers far fewer points
than most had hoped.
Though that doesn’t catch us up completely, I’ll leave
the rest for the next post. That way Paul won’t complain about my posts being
too long, which I still think about most nights when I’m trying to fall asleep.
The last event of the season is World Championships which started like two days
ago on March 5
th
(a Thursday). This means any roster changes needed
to be in by Wednesday evening at 11:59 PM Mountain Time. If you’re reading
this, you’re definitely too late. Sorry, shitter.
Cheers,
Dad