Hamelin on track to make history
Skater has a shot at his sixth Winter Games medal, with help from his relay friends
BEIJING Chaos and carnage.
They go together like rock ’n’ roll. Spaghetti and meatballs. Batman and Robin. Bonnie and Clyde.
C ’n’ C and DQs all over the ice in the maddened hurly-burly of shorttrack speedskating.
“It’s crazy for sure,” granted Jordan Pierre-Gilles, who was spectating on Friday evening — odd man out, on this night anyway, of the Canadian men’s 5000-metre relay team at the Winter Olympics. “A lot of people falling. A lot of calls from the refs.
“You can see in every race, everyone is all-in. There’s no holding back. It’s the Games. Everybody wants their medal. Everybody wants to show the world that they’re there for their country. The stakes, they’re really high. You can feel it.”
But with ramped-up energy, torqued emotions, that extra skipped heartbeat of risk, chances are there will be more spills, more collisions, more wipeouts, more penalties. And, of course, more gasps from the crowd, which is really part of the short-track ethos, no? The vicarious thrill, the rollercoaster shiver.
The restricted but quite fullthroated audience at Capital Indoor Stadium almost blew a collective gasket when Team China went spinning into a padded wall with 11 laps to go. Short-track to the Chinese — and even more so the South Koreans — is like hockey to Canadians.
So, when Team Canada won their semifinal, Steve Dubois bringing it home across the finish line in six minutes and 38.752 seconds, there was a frisson of anxiety. It was Pascal Dion’s skate that had clanged with that of the careening Chinese. Bit of a sweat there, waiting for the video review and the referee’s decision.
“The Chinese skater tried to pass me,” Dion would explain later, the picture of innocence.
“I think he was a little bit behind. I just kept my speed. If he was going to pass me, I would try to make Charles pass on the exchange.” Charles Hamelin, the éminence grise of the Canadian short-track cadre.
“But we just had contact with our blades.” Shrug. “It happens sometimes.”
It happens plenty, actually, especially here in the fraught environment of Olympic competition. Dion and his teammates, however, were fairly confident that there would be no penalizing, no punting of the Canadian squad.
As indeed there wasn’t — the contact was deemed unintentional — but the Chinese were also granted a spot in the Feb. 14 final, expanding the field of medal contenders to five.
It was an upbeat note for the Canadians — Dion, Hamelin, Dubois, Maxime Laoun — to wind up a week that brought both the elation of medals (Dubois silver in the 1,500, Kim Boutin with a bronze in the 500) and deflation in chances that slipped away (Boutin, unmolested, cashing in her 1,000 heat; Hamelin DQ’d in the last individual race of his remarkable career).
Here they go, then, the Québécois ensemble, one for all and all for one. But most of all, all for Hamelin as they collectively hope to carrying the 37-year-old into a tie with longtracker Cindy Klassen for the alltime Canadian Winter Games medal record. Which would be six. Hamelin, at his fifth Games, has five.
“We’ll try our best to make sure he has his medal,” vowed Dion as his compatriots nodded in agreement. “Make him go into history.”
Hamelin kind of aw-shucked about it. But sure, he wants it bad, perhaps less for the historical record than the taste of a medal with his brothers-in-blades on the way out the door.
“I’ll do my job to earn it. Same as them. We win as a team.”
With skates in hand, gathered in the mixed zone — their attention briefly seized by the women’s 1,000metre final on a giant TV screen and howling as Suzanne Schulting of the Netherlands copped gold (the reigning world champion shattered the world record in the earlier quarterfinals) — they’d looked like quintets in their matching Lululemon gear. Crowing over their just completed race, anticipating the final.
“We showed everyone in the relay today that we are strong and we are confident and we are smooth,” declared Hamelin.
Dubois agreed that, yes indeed, he had brought a psychic boost into the semifinal from his silver-medal performance 48 hours earlier. “Really positive energy, from the medal and the support from all my teammates. I think it brought me more relaxed energy. I was less stressed out coming onto the ice, knowing I already have a medal, so I could really focus on what I needed to do today.”
And Laoun, well, he’d promptly recovered from the disappointment of crashing out unimpeded, nobody near him — in his 500-metre heat. In less than an hour, he was lining up for the relay with “the boys.”
“I don’t know if it was a technique problem or the ice broke under my foot,” he said of the crash in the 500. “Just fell, that’s all.”
But he gathered himself together promptly.
“For me, it was like: OK, I fell. I have the relay in 45 minutes. How can I come back? How can I be there for them? Our team is strong, we can overcome anything.”
If they survive the anarchy of short-track, of course.
South Korea qualified with the fastest time for the relay final, followed by the Russian Olympic Committee.
Pierre-Gilles and Dubois also advanced to Sunday’s 500-metre semi, while Courtney Sarault and Alyson Charles had their medal hopes dashed in the 1,000-metre quarterfinals.