Speedskating: Year In Review (conclusion), and more...

Before part two of my year-end review of speedskating, a recap of the weekend’s competitions, and there were loads of them on three continents. For when the dust cleared, the question of who will participate in February’s world championships allround and sprints came into a better focus.

The first stop on our new year’s weekend world tour is the Netherlands, where the Dutch allround and sprint championships were contested in Heerenveen. It proved even Superman at times can be human. But he’s still going to try for his first career European title anyway.

Defending world champion Gianni Romme was ill and withdrew from the second day’s races, after finishing 5th in the 5000m. The men’s allround national championship was won by a fellow that it will be fun to see how much NBC messes up the pronouncement of his name leading up to the 2002 Winter Olympics - Jochem Uytdehaage. He edged 2-time world allround champion Ids Postma and 1998 junior world champion Mark Tuitert.

Despite Jelmer Beulenkamp’s 4th place finish, and the fact the top four finishers qualify for the European Championships the weekend after next in Baselga diPine’, Italy, the national governing body of Dutch speedskating chose Romme instead. In Holland, the Dutch have the power to give a skater who is a reigning world champion or such the equivalent of a mulligan if he/she falters in a national championship competition. Joining them in Baselga will be national allround women’s champion Tonny deJong, along with 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishers Renate Groenewold, Barbara deLoor and Wieteke Cramer.

This will be the first time in nearly a decade that EC will not have as one of its participants Rintje Ritsma, the career leader in European titles with six in the past seven years. He had an awful Dutch championship in which he did not qualify for the final distance, the 10000 meters.

On the sprint side, the Dutch will send Erben Wennemars (men’s winner) Gerard van Velde (silver), Jeroen Straathof (bronze) and Jan Bos to Inzell, Germany in February for the World Sprint Championships. Their women’s team will consist of double Olympic champion Marianne Timmer, Andrea Nuyt and Frouke Oonk.

Our next stop is Germany (via Finland, which had its sprint championships, won by Janne Hanninen and Anna Horsmalati, who will be their country’s representatives at the world sprints). A place where the 1999 European women’s allround champion will be especially busy in the next month.

Defending European women’s champion Anni Friesinger qualified for Europeans and the world sprint championships in her hometown of Inzell by skating in the German allround and sprint championships. Friesinger’s teammates in Baselga will be women’s winner Gunda Niemann-Stirnemann, Claudia Pechstein, and Daniela Anschütz. The men’s team will consist of Frank Dittrich, Christian Breuer and Jan Friesinger (Anni’s brother).

Anni’s mates at Inzell will be 2-time world sprint women’s champion Monique Garbrecht, Sabine Völker and Marion Wohlrab. Breuer will also pull double duty in the world sprints with countrymen Michael Künzel, Andreas Behr and Jan Waterstradt.

On our way to Italy, we next stop in Austria, where their national championships allround took place at Innsbruck, where Marnix ten Kortenaar will be the lone male representative at Europeans, along with women’s champion Emese Antal-Dorfler and Emese Hunyady, the latter of whom had already pre-qualified.

Still heading south, we reach Italy, the country of the 2001 European championships for their national title events. And there was no doubt about the winner of the women’s allround championship.

Roberto Sighel captured another allround men’s championship in Collalbo, Italy, while Nicole Mayr had the field all to herself - since she was the field. Mayr was the only competitor in the women’s allround races. On the sprint side, Ermanno Iorartti and Chihara Simionato captured the Italian men’s and women’s sprint championships.

Next up - Japan, where a similar changing of the guard took place at its national allround championships, although not on the scale of Ritsma’s possible last hurrah as a major player in Dutch speedskating.

For the first time in memory, Hiroyuki Noake did not make the cut in qualifying in Ikaho, Japan, site of its allround championships. He will instead be a reserve as perennial contender Keiji Shiratata and veteran Toshihiko Itokawa will be joined by two rookies, Takahiro Ushiyama and Eiji Kohara. The top three women’s finishers, world allround bronze medalist Maki Tabata, Nami Nemoto and Eriko Seo go to Budapest in mid-February, but 4th place finisher Aki Tonoike, who is 6th on the 500 and 4th in the 1000m World Cup points standings was passed over for newcomer Yuri Obara, who excelled on the 3000 and 5000m, scoring 6th place in both races vs. Tonoike’s 12th on both distances.

And now, we end this worldwide tour in the US of A, which does things a little bit different than the rest of the world.

The top six men and six women move onto the North American Qualification for the allround world championships on January 12-14. Since the regional qualification setup was established, in a marked departure from every other country which practices long-track speedskating, those in the top four in the men's and women's standings automatically punched their ticket for Milwaukee and did not have to skate the final day’s races.

To that end, Jennifer Rodriguez, Ann Driscoll, Catherine Raney and Shana Sundstrom as well as Derek Parra, KC Boutiette, Chris Callis, and JP Shilling, in order, the top 4 finishers in the women’s and men’s races after three events, pre-qualified and did not skate on New Year’s Eve. Rounding out Team USA will be Jondon Trevena and Jason Hedstrand for the men, Bonnie Whitehill and Sarah Elliott for the women.

Now from 5 ascending to 1, the top stories in speedskating in 2000:

#5. Ice Follies The Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns, which will host a speedskating event of some note in February 2002, was scheduled to open in September, but an April construction accident left three workers injured and part of the roof damaged. The opening had to be pushed back a quarter-year. In early November, the concrete base was poured in - nearly a thousand cubic yards of it which took 9 ½ hours to do. Just three weeks later, it was announced the pour had gone wrong and had to be totally redone, as in the concrete being torn up and worked over. The first casualty of this was the national allround championships which were scheduled for Salt Lake, but had to be sent to Butte this weekend.

All January 2001 competitions at the UOO have been cancelled. The US Sprint Championships next weekend, and the North American Qualifier for the world allround championships in Budapest, Hungary, were relocated to Milwaukee. A decision is expected next Sunday on whether the 2001 World Single Distance Championships on March 9-11 will also have to be moved to the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee.

#4. A Bridesmaid No More She was Frazier to her teammate’s Ali until February 6. For four straight years, Germany’s Claudia Pechstein had to settle for the next-to-highest spot on the podium to Gunda Niemann-Stirnemann at the world allround championships. Yet there was compelling evidence that Gunda’s decade-long stranglehold at the top of women’s speedskating was weakening.

In 1998, Pechstein watched as Niemann became the first woman to skate below 7 minutes on the 5000 meters in the next to last pair of the speedskating competition at the Olympics. Pechstein became the second in the final pairing - and won the gold in world-record time by a mere 4/100ths of a second.

In Milwaukee, Pechstein finished ahead of her countrywoman in the first three races, building up a lead of 5.31 seconds going into the 5000, which would decide the champion. The two were paired together, both knowing that Pechstein could conceivably lose the pairing and still dethrone Gunda, as long as any part of that margin was maintained at the end.

The two felt each other out for the first 3 laps, then Niemann made her move. She began to pull away from Pechstein gradually through the next 7 laps, but the 1998 European champion counter-punched enough that, with a lap left, she still had a 2.66 second overall lead. Niemann hit the afterburners and won the race in track record time, but was 1.55 seconds behind where it counted, in the final ranking.

World championship for Claudia, the first of her career, and silver for Gunda in the women’s speedskating race of the year.

#3. How the mighty have fallen It was a year from hell for the nation which gave speedskating fans legends such as Oscar Mathisen, Ivar Ballangrud, Hjalmar Andersen, Knut Johannessen and Johann Olav Koss, winners of nearly a score of European, World and Olympic titles between them.

In the year 2000, Norway was hit with one star-crossed moment after another. Witness:

•Adne Sondral, the 1998 Olympic 1500m champion and WSD 2000 men’s 1000m winner, becomes the laughing stock of the speedskating community with his ‘every other lap fast’ approach to the 5000 and 10000 at the world allround championships;

•In the spring, the women’s national team coach decided to take a better-paying offer and jump ship to a Dutch corporate-sponsored team (those kind of commercial teams have really taken a foothold in the Netherlands for a year or two now);

•The national men’s allround coach resigns a few weeks later;

•Months of trying to secure a sponsor for the national team prove fruitless;

•Their top female allround hope for the future is lost for the 2000-01 season due to illness;

•Finally, the announcement that despite the fact Norway can send three women to this month’s European Championships in Baselga diPine, Italy, the Norwegian Skating Federation will send only one.

Maybe we Americans aren’t so bad off . . .

2. Lucky 13 - for now . . . If one athlete defined speedskating in 2000, it was Gianni Romme. The Dutch superstar holds world records from 3000 meters (which he set on August 12 in Calgary) up to 10000. He swept the 5000 and 10000m races at the 1998 Nagano Olympics and just for fun, did the same thing 2 years later in the same venue for the World Single Distance Championships in March. He led a Dutch sweep of the men’s world allround medals at Milwaukee. The Norwegians were so impressed that they awarded him the Oscar trophy (for Mathisen, a 5-time world champ in the 1910's), a symbol of the world’s best speedskater, regardless of gender or discipline.

He capped off a year for the ages on November 26th in Heerenveen, Netherlands by chopping 5 seconds off his 10,000m world record and brought the sport that much closer to the day when one will need to skate less than 13 minutes to have any notion of getting a gold medal. Romme went 13:03.40 in the men’s speedskating race of the year. And he’s only 27.

#1. The Eleven: For Shame! Sadly, the top speedskating story of 2000 is also its most infuriating to fans who want level playing fields when they see competitions.

On November 18, a story was published that eleven world-class speedskaters had, during doping tests with brand-new equipment which can detect drug use for a lot longer time than what’s in use now, tested positive for erythroepoetin, or EPO, at the World Allround and Single Distance Championships last February and March, respectively. Since the test is still not sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee, the International Skating Union could not reveal the names of the doped 11. EPO is banned by countless sports organizations because it illegally increases oxygen supply to the bloodstream. It was the focal point of the 1998 Tour de France scandal which pretty much destroyed cycling’s credibility with the general public.

The decision not to reveal which 11 got caught in the doping cookie jar went over like a root canal. Howls of outrage came from skaters and officials who decried the secrecy, saying as long as the 11 remain unnamed, the whole sport will be guilty by association. Both the ISU and IOC have been extremely reluctant to sanction the new testing for reasons known to themselves.

That dovetails quite nicely into Five Questions for 2001 which will be answered at some point before Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve commences next December 31. These are in no particular order:

•Will there be more drug testing of speedskaters and, more to the point, will names be named if there are any more positive tests for EPO from here on out?

•Will we see a sub-4 minute women’s 3000m race before the season ends in mid-March? There are two planets-in-proper-alignment possibilities for that to occur; February 23 in Heerenveen and March 2 in Calgary; three if Salt Lake gets its house in order, which leads to this next Question of 2001 . . .

•Can Calgary keep its title of the planet’s fastest indoor oval? It holds 25 of the 30 ISU-recognized world records in long track speedskating. Heerenveen saw its first world record races since November 1997, and sooner or later, Salt Lake’s oval will step up to the plate. Which means now is a very good time to ask the next Question of 2K1;

*Will the Utah Olympic Oval challenge Calgary hegemony on the world record market when it opens? It all depends on the second repouring of the concrete base of its oval. Logic dictates that on the basis of altitude alone, 1,305 meters above sea level, vs. 1,035 meters for Calgary that it should cut into their percentage of world records; the air is thinner and when that happens, skaters go much, much faster. But will it, after all the travails its been through? Time will tell. And finally;

•Can the US Short Track speedskating team keep up the momentum of good vibes after a near 6-week hiatus at the end of January as the season comes to a close? Answers are forthcoming on all these questions.

Next week, total coverage of the Canadian speedskating championships in Calgary (where the 500 and 1000m world records could be in danger) and the U.S. Sprints in Milwaukee. With any luck, we’ll also have word one way or the other whether or not the World Single Distance Championships will stay put in Salt Lake City or be moved to, in all probability, Milwaukee.

Have a great new year, everyone.