Speed Skating at the Winter Olympic Games Beijing 2022

[heywoodu 16,461]

50 minutes ago, Herki said:

Really pleased with Marten Liiv's 7th place, he said he aims top 10 and he made it, at least 1 our athlete who reached their goal.

TBH I rate this result higher than Saskia Alusalu's "4th" at PY.

Oh absolutely, a 7th place for an Estonian in a regular distance, that is seriously a fantastic result!

[NearPup 4,182]

After the under-performance in the 500m this medal by Laurent Dubreuil feel like, to quote Petra Majdič, a gold with little diamonds in it.

[dcro 10,211]

Rodriguez got invited for the mass start.

[orangeman 2,876]

Right, like I said it was a nice show of sportsmanship but it's not like he threw away a gold to do it.  He knew he wasn't close to the podium and there was nothing to gain.  Good job, though.  

[Noorderling29 238]

You are wrong. To be certain I rewatched the race. It confirmed that Verbij was 0.01 faster than Krol at 600 metres, and he is renowed for his excellent final lap. Without this incident he would have beaten Lorentzen’s time and probably even Dubreuil’s. It would have been close for first. 

[heywoodu 16,461]

47 minutes ago, Noorderling29 said:

and he is renowed for his excellent final lap.

Just to help confirming this: in the two important 1000m's they had before the Olympics, their last laps were roughly 0.1 second apart from each other. Verbij's last lap was a tiny bit faster once, Krol's last lap a tiny bit faster the other time. So yeah, without this situation it would most likely have been very tight indeed.

[heywoodu 16,461]

Right, the main speed skating is over, time for the circus  

 

We start with the men's Not-A-Marathon. Which could be Sven Kramer's last race. I hope not, it'd be cool to see him and Bergsma in the final and see how they solve the thing of having to kind of pretend to work together  

[heywoodu 16,461]

And that's Kramer out.

[heywoodu 16,461]

Oh, he's through to the final after all. I forgot in this event you have to wait for a while after the finish until you can really know what the result of the race is.

 

Anyhow, the plan ("putting someone like Kramer in this event can scare the competition") doesn't seem to be that fantastic. Surprising  

[Gianlu33 6,015]

I will never understanding why they don't use the finish order. C'mon, who cares about stupid sprints