Blades of fury
Tuesday morning brings with it our first casualty. That was dark, sorry, but our short track 500m speed skater, Marianne St-Gelais was disqualified from her quarter-final race Tuesday morning having been flagged for interference with Dutch racer Yara Van Kerkhof. Can’t imagine the disappointment of having your Olympic dreams taken from you over a judgeruled technicality. But with those giant blades flying it’s not hard to see how anything flirting with the line between aggressive sportsmanship and near fatal carotid puncture justifies the strict nature of the safety-first rules. Clacking their way around the track nine times to make the 1,000m distance, the men took to the short track speed skating rink early Tuesday morning. Ripe with near elbows, slight butt grabs and tight turns, I’ve never noticed how aggressive these athletes can be. You’d never know from the near wandering nature of the starts – legs pushing laterally, casual forward folding with hands gracefully clasped behind them, during the early moments of these qualifying rounds you’d swear these guys were taking in a skate along a frozen pond. And then they release the Kraken.
Hulking out as best one can in a spandex suit, the racing starts as the shoulders cut low and the personal space becomes irrelevant. Of course, as schizophrenically as it started, it ends Canada’s Kim Boutin is hugged by teammate Marianne St-Gelias after finding out she has won the bronze medal in the women’s 500-metre shorttrack speedskating final at the Pyeonchang Winter Olympics Tuesday in Gangneung, South Korea.
with a pretty-princess toe point as they cross the line.
The individual events are one
thing but the tag-team relay event takes this unique ice dance to a whole other level.
The men’s 5,000m is 45 laps of proof that when push comes to shove, men can indeed get organized. In teams of four, one shift of four athletes compete at a time while their teammates mirror their efforts in the centre of the ice. Perfectly timing the exchanges, they give their colleagues a love tap in the form of an aggressive shove down the ice. Like human curling rocks.