ATOMIC BLONDIN
Canadian skater has a target on her back every time she steps on the ice,
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— Ivanie Blondin, one of Canada’s best medal hopes in Olympic speedskating, has always been fascinated by everything about animals.
The fascination isn’t always mutual. Blondin’s grey African parrot, Gizmo — who shares space in her life with her St. Bernard-Pyrenees puppy, Brooke — counts himself as less a speedskating aficionado than a hockey fan, no matter his master’s line of work.
“He really likes to watch hockey,” Blondin said of Gizmo. “When he hears the horn go off he’s actually, like, ‘He scores!’ He gets super-excited. It’s entertaining.”
If Gizmo likes hockey, mind you, it’s safe to say he’ll probably eventually come to appreciate Blondin’s athletic specialty — the mass-start event that is making an Olympic appearance for the first time since 1932. Mass start, wherein Blondin won the world championship in 2016, is a bit like short-track speedskating, only it’s done on a long track with fewer rules. And it’s a long-distance affair spanning 6,400 metres. Considering Blondin is a former short-tracker who has since acquired a capacity for endurance that also makes her a medal threat here in the 3,000 metres and 5,000 metres, the fit is natural.
“You can bodycheck girls. You can pull their hair if you want to, although I don’t recommend it. As long as the person doesn’t fall, you can’t get disqualified,” Blondin said, smiling broadly as she described the event. “There’s a lot of grabbing. And I’m not shy to push, either. If someone comes around me on the outside and is going to try to sneak by me, I’m just going to put my hand on her hip and push her back. That happens to me all the time, too.”
All of which is legal. As Mark Wild, one of Blondin’s formative coaches in the sport, was explaining recently: “The mass start is about as noncontact as basketball. There’s hands on, but only the blatant use is called a penalty.”
Blondin, for her part, is enjoying the chaos while it lasts. She figures the powers that be will eventually add more rules to the event to curb egregious abuses.
“There’s been quite a few falls and concussions and cuts and so on. So as the mass start evolves, there’s probably going to be more and more rules set,” Blondin said. “Kind of like short track. In short track there used to be less disqualifications and the rules got more elaborate. At some point I think that’s going to happen in the mass-start event, too.”
Blondin has certainly evolved as an athlete. A regular on the World Cup podium in recent years, she was far less accomplished four years ago in Sochi, where she finished 14th in the 5,000 metres and 24th in the 3,000 — results that paled compared to her fifth-place finish as a member of Canada’s team pursuit outfit (a race in which she’ll partake here, too). Blondin said the Sochi Games, which saw the speedskating oval dominated by the Dutch, amounted to an educational experience — specifically a study in what not to do.
“In Sochi I was like a scatterbrain. I was distracted by so many different things,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s just my mindset this time around, I’m just way more relaxed and just chill.”
“Relaxed” hasn’t always been her go-to self-descriptor. Wild describes Blondin as “highly competitive and sometimes misunderstood.”
Misunderstood how?
“Sometimes people can’t relate to someone at such a highly competitive level,” Wild said. “What she brings to the ice and the competition environment is not necessarily the person she is off the ice.”
On the ice, in the mass-start race, she’s a magnet for attention.
“I think most of the time the race revolves around me,” Blondin said. “I have a really big target on my back. It makes it hard for me to get on the podium.
“But I like a challenge. I’m superexcited.”
Super-excited, and more than willing to stiff-arm the next skater who attempts a pass.
“Obviously, you don’t want to go out there and bodycheck people,” Blondin said, “but the more aggressive you are, the better the outcome’s going to be . . . I think it’s going to be a crowd-pleaser, for sure.”
It all sounds like a viewing experience that might attract, say, a hockey-loving individual. Blondin said she’s holding out hope that Gizmo, currently bunking with Blondin’s parents in Ottawa, can peel his eyes away from the game to take in her race.
Said Blondin of her parrot: “He’ll be watching.”