Kearns Day 4: Does the medal Fitz? Oh yeah!

There may have been no joy in Mudville in that famous poem of long ago, but Tuesday, there was joy in Kearns, Utah; in Verona, Wisconsin, his hometown, and America itself.

For our national speedskating team, with a Mighty Casey of its own, in just three days has already surpassed what it accomplished in two weeks and change in Nagano four years prior.

Where figure skating is once again mired in the kind of noxious, toxic scandal only Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan could love, speedskating proved one more time, once and for absolute all, there is no equal to it in the drama and thrills department.

The results speak for themselves.

Savor them, for it's been the first time since February 23, 1994 that such a top-three Olympic ranking looked quite like this:

Men's 500 (combination of two races) 1. Casey Fitzrandolph (USA) 69.23 seconds 2. Hiroyasu Shimizu (JPN) 69.26 3. Kip Carpenter (USA) 69.47

It marks the 51st and 52nd medals for the United States in speedskating since it was a charter Olympic sport in 1924.

It marks the first gold medal for American speedskating since Bonnie Blair's last Olympic race, the 1,000 meters in Lillehammer, Norway.

It marks only the third time in the last 22 years an American male skater has won a gold medal (Eric Heiden running the table in 1980, and Dan Jansen's monumental kilometer win, also in Lillehammer), and the first on the men's 500 since 1980.

Carpenter's bronze was a bonus, a totally unexpected feat, a man who had not been considered a contender as much as Joe Cheek, who until this week was the national record holder on the distance.

Fitzrandolph and Carpenter provided the first two-person American podium finish in speedskating since 1976, when Leah Poulos and Sheila Young went silver-bronze on the women's 1000 at Innsbruck.

It's also the best U.S. men's finish on any Olympic speedskating race in 50 years, when in Oslo Ken Henry and Donald McDermott went 1-2 on the 500 at the 1952 Winter Games.

It is also the first American gold medal of these Games in a sport which came into existence before 1994, as the two other golds came in extreme sports which were added to the Olympic program.

Tuesday's win capped a magnificent season for Fitzrandolph, who had to come to grips with his training partner and best friend, Jeremy Wotherspoon of Canada, the men's world sprint champion wiping out on Monday, but had to knock out the defending Olympic and World Single Distance Champion Shimizu, whom he had a 19/100ths of a second advantage going into the conclusion of the competition.

He also had to contend with the memory of 1988, when he was in the bronze medal position going into the second race, and three false starts on his pairing between them rattled him to the point where he finished 6th that year.

And he needed just about every hundredth of that to stave off a valiant challenge by Shimizu as well as Dutchman Gerard van Velde, who was an agonizing .02 out of the podium, aced out by Carpenter.

You owed it to yourself to watch.

The results of the second day's races:

1. Jeremy Wotherspoon (CAN) 34.63

2. Hiroyasu Shimizu (JPN) 34.65

3. Jan Bos (NED) 34.72

4. Gerard van Velde (NED) 34.77

5. Kip Carpenter (USA) 34.79

6 Casey FitzRandolph (USA) 34,81 tie Toyoki Takeda (JPN) 34,81

8. Joe Cheek (USA) 34.82

9. Mike Ireland (CAN) 34.83

10. Kyu-Hyuk Lee (KOR) 34.85

11. Erben Wennemars (NED) 34.89

12. Kuniomi Haneishi (JPN) 34.96

13. Marc Pelchat (USA) 34.99

14. Dimitry Lobkov (RUS) 35.01

15. Manabu Horii (JPN) 35.02

16. Pawel Abratkiewicz (POL) 35.04

17. Jae-Bong Choi (KOR) 35.12

18. Janne Hanninen (FIN) 35.15

19. Sergei Klevchenja (RUS) 35.18

20. Dimitri Dorofejev (RUS) 35.27

21. Fengtong Yu (CHN) 35.30

22. Patrick Bouchard (CAN) 35.34

23. Chul-Soo Kim (KOR) 35.35

24. Yu Li (CHN) 35.35

25. Michael Kanzel (GER) 35.37

26. Tomasz Swist (POL) 35.55

27. Christian Breuer (GER) 35.57

28. Eric Brisson (CAN) 35.68

29. Davide Carta (ITA) 35.69

30. Grunde Njas (NOR) 35.90

31. Jae-Man Park (KOR) 35.91

32. Ids Postma (NED) 36.08

33. Dino Gillarduzzi (ITA) 36.27

34. Andrei Fomin (UKR) 36.38

35. Zsolt Balo (HUN) 36.69

36. Aleksei Chatilov (BLS) 37.41

The remainder of the field after the times for the two races were added together:

4. van Velde 69.49

5. Cheek 69.60

6. Ireland 69.60

7. Takeda 69.81

8. Lee 69.59

9. Bos 69.86

10. Wennemars 69.89

11. Lobkov 70.10

12. Haneishi 70.11

13. Klevtsjenja 70.28

14. Horii 70.32

15. Hanninen 70.33

16. Abratkiewicz 70.44

17. Choi 70.57

18. Dorofeyev 70.75

19. Kanzel 70.84

20. Bouchard 70.88

21. Li 70.97

22. Swist 71.27

23. Carta 71.39

24. Brisson 71.54

25. Park 71.96

26. Breuer 72.07

27. Postma 72.49

28. Pelchat 72.58

29. Fomin 72.64

30. Gillarduzzi 72.69

31. Balo 72.93

32. Chatylyov 74.81

33. Kim 108.46

34. Yu 117.41

35. Njos 133.57

The next event for the men will be the 1,000 meters on Saturday. Fitzrandolph, Wotherspoon, Cheek and van Velde are expected to be the main contenders for gold on that distance.

Fitzrandolph and Carpenter skated a victory lap as a raucous crowd of 5,200 sang with Queen in "We Are The Champions."

Queen. Apropos, on a day fit for a king.

Chris Witty will indeed give it a go Wednesday, as these pairing for the first of two women's 500m races show:

1. Kristina Egyed (HUN, alone)

2. Marieke Wijsman (NED) - Seung-Yong Choi (KOR)

3. Seon-Yeon Cho (KOR) - Svetlana Radkevitsj (BLS)

4. Yong-Joo Lee (KOR) - Emese Hunyady (AUT)

5. Marion Wohlrab (GER) - Tomomi Okazaki (JPN)

6. Chihara Simionato (ITA) - Amy Sannes (USA)

7. Aihua Xing (CHN) - Elli Ochowicz (USA)

8. Chunyuan Yang (CHN) - Becky Sundstrom (USA)

9. Susan Auch (CAN) - Chris Witty (USA)

10. Marianne Timmer (NED) - Svetlana Kaikan (RUS)

11. Manli Wang (CHN) - Yukari Watanabe (JPN)

12. Hua Jin (CHN) - Jenny Wolf (GER)

13. Eriko Sanmiya (JPN) - Catriona Lemay Doan (CAN)

14. Monique Garbrecht (GER)- Andrea Nuyt (NED)

15. Anzhelika Kotjoega (BLS) - Sabine Vƒlker (GER)

16. Sayuri Osuga (JPN) - Svetlana Zhurova (RUS)

We'll have "what others are saying" tomorrow.