Jean gets up to speed with skate-crazy Dutch
Olivier Jean is perhaps best known in Canada for surviving a gruesome skate cut to his ankle that severed a tendon, but ahead of the 2018 Winter Olympics, he’s spending a lot more time in the spotlight.
The 32-year-old from Repentigny, Que., credits training in the Netherlands — where speedskating is as much of an obsession as hockey is in Canada — for vaulting him onto the podium at the 2017 World Single Distance Speed Skating Championships. Considered an underdog after switching to long track, Jean won a surprise bronze in mass start on Sunday behind Joey Mantia of the United States and Alexis Contin of France.
“It’s so different in Holland — just the whole culture surrounding the sport,” Jean told Postmedia from Gangneung, South Korea. “Heerenveen is a speedskating city. There’s a speedskating café. You go to the shoe store and where they repair shoes, they also repair speedskates. Every sporting shop has speedskating equipment and skin suits. It’s just so much more present.”
The Dutch won 23 of 36 medals in long track at the 2014 Sochi Games, leading their rivals to complain that such dominance is damaging to the sport.
Jean figures the best way to beat the Dutch is to join them and learn, much like European hockey players who cross the Atlantic to play junior in Canada and the U.S. His game plan: to skate 50-kilometre marathons with his Dutch training partners to build up endurance.
Experience in the marathons changed his perspective, he said.
“It’s really good on the mental part,” Jean said, “to give me full confidence in my ability to sustain a hard eight-minute race.”