The cost of five-100ths of a second,
For most people, five-100ths of a second has little meaning or consequence. But it’s a painfully measurable time for Laurent Dubreuil.
The 21-year-old long-track speedskater from Lévis, Que., missed making the Canadian Olympic team by that much — or rather, that little.
“Five-100ths is nothing. ... It’s maybe 10, 20 centimetres, a few inches — it’s really nothing,” Dubreuil told The Gazette last week.
At the Olympic trials in Calgary after Christmas, the men competing in the 500-metre event skated that distance twice, with the combined time counting as their score.
Dubreuil, who trains at the Gaétan Boucher National Centre in Quebec City, said he felt his chances of going to the Olympics were good. His ninth-place finish in the 500-metre event at last year’s world championships in Sochi, Russia, was the best by a Canadian.
Of the two 500-metre distances he skated in Calgary, Dubreuil posted a faster time in the first one, but he also stuck the tip of his blade into the ice during a curve. He almost fell, and says he lost a lot of speed because of it.
“It’s clear that that technical mistake changed everything for me,” he said.
He finished fifth, with an overall time of 69.46, behind Muncef Ouardi, his training partner in Quebec City and friend, who had a combined time of 69.41.
“When you put as much effort as I did, when you aim for that and you think about it every day, you train as hard as you can and you miss it by so little, it’s extremely disappointing,” Dubreuil said.
His heartfelt and gracious account of the painful experience was posted a few weeks ago on Radio-Canada and CBC’s websites. “Even though the margin that separates me from Sochi ended up being only five-100ths of a second, I was too slow that day,” he wrote.
“The disappointment is so vivid that it has been following me everywhere ever since,” Dubreuil said in the piece.
“Most of all I don’t want to bemoan my origins,” he went on to say, “but had I not been Canadian, my performance at the Olympic selections would have sent me straight to Sochi. Today, I could defend the colours of any country in the world, except for the Dutch team.”
Dubreuil also congratulated Ouardi, saying he’s happy for his friend even though he won’t get to go to Sochi himself. He later tweeted his thanks to people for supporting him, saying: “I’ve received a huge number of messages and appreciate every one of them.”
A few former Olympians, including Clara Hughes, reached out to Dubreuil on Twitter. She didn’t make the Olympics the first time she tried “and it worked out OK,” Hughes wrote as reassurance. She competed in six Olympics — three Summer Games in cycling and three Winter Games in long-track speedskating — and won six medals over that span.
After his post on the RadioCanada and CBC websites, Dubreuil said, he saw a lot of positive comments about the way he handled the ordeal. “I think it says a lot about an athlete or a human being in general in life the way people respond to adversity, to disappointment. How do they react when they fail?”
All athletes go through tough times; how they pick themselves up when they’re defeated and use that disappointment to become better — those are signs of champions, he said.
Dubreuil started skating when he was four. “My parents are former skaters, so it’s the first sport they had me try.”
His father, Robert, competed in short-track speedskating in 1988 at the Calgary Olympics, when it was a demonstration sport, and at the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France, in long-track. Dubreuil’s mother, Ariane Loignon, competed in longtrack at the Calgary Games.
The 500-metre event is Dubreuil’s strength, and he holds the world junior record in that distance.
Canada has a deep team in the 500-metre men’s event, Dubreuil said, adding that the skaters at the Olympic trials who finished fifth, sixth and seventh in that event were very close in times to those who finished first, second, third and fourth. “And that’s extremely rare. We can’t say that we have that in the other distances. It’s really the most competitive distance by far.”
Even though he says it will be extremely painful, Dubreuil intends to watch the Olympics on television, for three reasons: so that he doesn’t forget the failure and tries to get better, to encourage Ouardi, with whom he has trained for years, and because speedskating is his passion.
He plans to use his disappointment as motivation to become better. “It will be my motivation obviously for next year, but I would even say for the rest of my career. It will be my biggest motivation each time I’ll go train.
“For sure it’s not the result I wanted, and I’d like to be at the Games now,” Dubreuil said. “But in the long term I think it will make me grow as a person, as an athlete, and it will help me in the rest of my life.”