South Korea gets off to blazing start with win in men’s 1,500
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA» They stood on the platform next to each other, each a medal winner, one for the host country of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the other for — and let's get this straight right now — Russia, despite what his uniform said. What played out Saturday night at Gangneung Ice Arena was, by name, the 1,500-meter men’s short-track speedskating final. But step back a bit and see the reality: These Games’ two primary themes were there, skating, side by side.
When you come here, try the bibimbap and the kimchi. Ride in a Hyundai and drink some soju. (Note: Haven’t tried it yet. Will get back to you.)
This is college football in the Deep South, hockey in Toronto, soccer in Brazil. But even in the delirious arena that’s home to South Korea’s signature sport, you have to allow for the possibility that factors other than race strategy and tactics could overwhelm everything else.
The winner of the men’s 1,500 meters was Lim Hyo-jun, a 21-year-old native of Daegu, South Korea, who set an Olympic record and won the host country’s first medal of its own games — gold, at that.
“"I dreamed of this for life,” Lim said. When he received his stuffed animal memento during Saturday night's brief, anthemless presentation — the actual medal ceremony, complete with the hardware, would come later — the competitor to his left was Semen Elistratov, a 27-year-old native of Ufa, Russia.
Elistratov didn't wear his home nation’s traditional red but instead white and blue — almost Finland-ish. That's the uniform for the Olympic Athletes from Russia — the semantic creation of the International Olympic Committee, which banned the Russian Olympic Committee for what it determined was state-sponsored doping at the previous Winter Olympics, held on Russian soil. Elis- tratov will be awarded bronze, the first medal for what the IOC will call “OAR,” but what the rest of the world should absolutely call “Russia.”
We have examined Russia’s case from a bureaucratic perspective, from a goodvs.-evil perspective. Saturday night, we got, from Elistratov, the personal perspective.
“Before I went to the Olympics, they told me, ‘You should make a choice whether you are going to these Olympic Games or not,’ ” Elistratov said through an interpreter. “This was not an easy decision at all. That’s why my bronze Olympic medal, it’s almost like a platinum medal.”
Elistratov was well aware that the Russian champion Viktor Ahn, who won three gold medals and a bronze in Sochi, isn’t here, and his presence could have changed the race Saturday night, could have changed any of the rest of the short-track program. But Ahn was one of the Russian athletes whose appeal to compete in Pyeongchang was denied at the last minute by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. That decision will shape this competition, just as it will the competition at so many other venues.