Home-ice advantage in a faraway land
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— The days just before the Olympics begin are quiet ones at the long-track oval, with speedskaters using their final few training sessions to get used to a new ice surface.
“It’s real fast today,” an American coach tells the man responsible for this ice.
Fast ice is always a compliment to an icemaker but, in this case, it’s an extra acknowledgement of skill and Canada’s Mark Messer smiles upon hearing it.
The physical laws that govern the earth are unyielding, and the one that dictates “the lower the altitude, the greater the air pressure” means that this oval at the 2018 Olympics should not produce fast times.
But Messer has been here for six weeks doing all he can to change that. He’s determined to make the fastest ice possible in an oval that sits just a few metres above sea level. And he doesn’t need the race clock to tell him when he’s succeeded; he can see it and he can hear it.
“There’s a clarity and a gleam to the ice that you don’t get other times, and you just know looking at it that it’s going to be fast,” Messer says.
“If the ice is not right skaters will dig in too much, and you’ll hear them pushing ice and you’ll see the snow coming off. When it’s just right, it’s quieter. It’s a hiss almost and a very fine puff of snow, if anything, that comes off — it’s amazing to see.”
Messer, who normally runs the Calgary Olympic Oval, which is known for being one of the two fastest in the world, has spent weeks with his team, meticulously building this ice surface and fine-tuning it in search of that perfect look and sound.
“I think it’s wonderful,” American speedskating coach Tom Cushman says. “To me, it very much has the feel of a Calgary ice and we know that’s fast.”
It’s been a long road to even make that a possibility for these Games.
Messer made 10 trips to the Gangneung Oval during construction — long before it was connected to the Seoul airport by a two-hour highspeed train — trying to make sure the ice plant and refrigeration systems would be up to the job.
During a weeklong summer trip in 2016 to make test ice, there were so many equipment failures they only managed to make ice on a single day. Then a year ago, the oval hosted the 2017 world single-distance speedskating championships as a test event for the Olympics. After one bad day when the ice wouldn’t bond to the concrete floor, Messer and his team created ice so fast that some low-land world records were broken.
“That was our notice to the world that we’re going to be good here: don’t expect slow ice,” Messer says.
But doing it once doesn’t guarantee a repeat performance. Ice is finicky stuff and everything from the weather outside to the number of spectators in the building affects it. That’s why it normally takes years to learn the nuances of a new oval, but Messer — who made ice in Calgary in 1988, Salt Lake City in 2002, Turin in 2006 and Vancouver in 2010 — knows that’s a luxury Olympic ice-makers never get.
“In Vancouver we were blindsided by the light, really. We had run the test event and everything else right up to the Games with house lighting, and then they decided a couple weeks before the Games it wasn’t sufficient (for broadcast), so they brought in all new lighting and we just never caught up. The heat load off the lighting was more than the ice plant could handle,” he says. “We succeeded in making the ice the same for everybody, but it wasn’t the best ice possible.”
In long-track — other than the new mass-start event — athletes skate against the clock in pairs, so it’s vital that the ice conditions for the first pair are the same as for the final one.
Good, bad and variable conditions are something that skaters just have to get used to, says Ted-Jan Bloemen, one of Canada’s strongest hopes for multiple medals at these Games.
“Sometimes in the week leading up to a race, it’s colder in the rink and then it warms up and the ice changes, and you’re not always prepared for that so you learn to be a little more adaptive,” he says.
The higher altitude of Calgary’s oval — where Canada’s national long-track team trains — means there’s less air pressure and resistance working against the skaters. That can add up to almost a second a lap faster there than here, he says.
But for Canadian skaters there’s still something familiar about this ice.
“It felt so good,” Ivanie Blondin recalled from the test event last year. “And seeing Mark Messer and those guys on the Zamboni, and giving them a head nod and them nodding back, it was such a cool feeling,” she says. “It felt like home ice.” Messer smiles on hearing that, too. “If we can make it feel like Calgary, that’s great,” he says.
All current world records in men’s and women’s long-track were set at the higher-altitude ovals in Calgary or Salt Lake City.
Athletes have trained long and hard to be at their best for two weeks of races starting Saturday, and Messer wants to give them the best platform to showcase their skills.
“The biggest obstacle for the skaters with speed is the friction of the ice and the friction through the air. We can’t do anything about the friction in the air — they use special suits and tactics for that; their positioning is very important — but we try to make the ice as frictionless as possible while still giving them enough grip so they can push,” he explains.
To that end, the water used to make the ice is purified well past drinking water standards and the ice temperature is held at a steady -8 C. The air temperature inside the oval is regulated at 15 C and the humidity is controlled, too, because if it gets too high it will settle on the ice as frost and slow the skaters.
“The one thing that drives me batty here is that nobody closes the doors,” Messer says.
“That corner,” he says, pointing to one end of the oval, “is two or three degrees colder than the rest of the building.”
Messer talks about climate conditions as though they’re opponents out to undermine his ice.
Making ice is usually a 10-day process, but here that went up to 13 when they had to stop for three days, to protect the ice from contaminants when the workers laying down the rubber centre mats went over schedule.
“There’s always something,” he says, “but this has been pretty minor actually, compared to some Olympics.”
Messer’s team worked in shifts to turn what was an empty concrete floor into this gleaming sheet of ice with 400 marker dots — which have to be placed within 2 millimetres of specifications — to create the lanes of the 400-metre track.
“This first week and a half of making the ice is crucial. Once you’ve got it built, we’ve got to maintain it. It’s a team, it’s not one person,” says Messer, who has seven people with him to keep this ice in shape through two weeks of competition.
In the equipment bay are three brand new Zambonis decked out in Olympic colours, but — showing his Canadian roots — Messer considers that two main ice resurfacers (made in Brantford, Ont.) and a spare (made in Paramount, Calif.).
There are Canadians making ice in multiple Olympic venues here, including hockey, curling and the sliding track up the mountain. Each of them has their own tricks to achieve the desired ice temperature, thickness and sport-specific nuance, such as covering the short-track ice with a layer of water or pebbling the surface in curling.
“We go very cold on long-track ice because we’re trying to get that friction down . . . For every push you want the ice strong enough to push on, and you want that one push to take you as far as possible effortlessly,” Messer says.
“We have so many factors that you have to bounce around — the air temperature, the ice temperature, the ice composition — the operators on the Zambonis make a big difference. And when you get those six or seven balls in the air and you get them in the same place at the same time and it comes together, it’s magical.”