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Sports
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| Denny Morrison | Les Wiseman
October 2009
Movie Entertainment
Historians claim that skating began with primitive man lashing deer antlers to his feet, but it wasn’t until the advent of those really tight superhero-type suits that the sport became a big viewer event.
Who can forget Catriona LeMay Doan winning gold and setting an Olympic record for the 500 metres in the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games and defending that title in 2002 at Salt Lake City? She looked so super-heroic in her speed suit.
Speed skating is Canada’s sport for 2010, with oddsmakers predicting that this is where our national team will bring home the most medals at the 2010 Olympics in Whistler and Vancouver, to run Feb. 12-28.
“Own the Podium” is a $120-million program to help Canada win more medals than any other country. That would likely require more than 30.
The expectation put on our sport from Own the Podium, together from short track and long track, is 15 medals,” Jean Dupré, director general of Speed Skating
Canada, has said.
Long track, or simply speed skating, in which athletes surpass speeds of 60 km/h, has been around since the 1924 Games in Chamonix, France.
The standard distances are: the 500m, 1,000m, and 1,500m, 3,000m (women only), 5,000m and 10,000m (men only) on a standardized 400m rink. The competitions feature races between two participants.
Short track was upgraded from a demonstration sport in 1992. It is characterized by mass starts and divided into the same lengths as long-track competition, with the addition of a women’s 3,000m relay and men’s 5,000m relay. The standardized track is an oval of 111.12m.
Canada’s belle of the 2010 ball is expected to be Winnipeg long-tracker Cindy Klassen, 30. She is already referred to as Canada’s greatest Olympian for her six medals — five at the 2006 Turin Games and one from 2002 in Salt Lake City. Klassen’s challenge for 2010 is recovering from 2008 surgery on both knees. “That’s a real challenge,” she has said. “It’s like starting from scratch again.” In February 2008, Klassen’s sister, Lisa, was in a car accident that saw her stuck underwater for five minutes. She has recovered, but Klassen cancelled last year’s competitive season to support Lisa.
Denny Morrison, 23, of Fort St. John, B.C., has been speed skating since the age of three and has been a member of Team Canada for five years. He holds the world record for the 1,500m event, which he set in March 2008.
Morrison also is strong in team pursuit, an event in which two teams race and the leaders fall back in rotation to the rear.
Morrison won a silver in this event in 2006. Individually, he also won a silver in the 1,500m and a bronze in the 1,500m at the Turin World Cup in 2005-2006.
At the Canadian single distances championships, the first event at the new Richmond Olympic Oval, where he will skate in the Olympics, Morrison won an overall bronze medal for the 500m and a silver for the 5,000m.
Kristina Groves, 32, is known as Canada’s “speed skating superwoman” in the sports fish-wraps. But the Calgarian was recently put in a pinch when access to that city’s Olympic Oval was reduced due to funding cutbacks. “It isn’t just a huge part of what we do, it is what we do. We skate,” she told CTV.
Still, alternative training venues were sorted out and she is ready for 2010. Groves is rated No. 1 in the world in the 1,500m and is in the top three in the 3,000m and the 5,000m.
The long-track team will be announced in early January, while the short-track team was to be named on Aug. 26.
One short-track skater pre-qualified for the Olympics: Charles Hamelin, 25, of Ste. Julie, Que. In Turin, Hamelin won silver in the men’s 5000m relay. He won eight individual medals during the 2007- 08 World Cup season.
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