Short track tense, edgy, emotional
vancouversun.com
Mon 27 Oct 2008
Section: Sports
Byline: Cam Cole
Source: Vancouver Sun columnist

By mid-afternoon, Vanoc had already issued its press release, detailing what it learned from the first test event of short track speed skating at the 2010 Olympic venue, Pacific Coliseum.

But what the people who turned up to watch got out of the Samsung ISU World Cup finale could not be summarized in a few paragraphs on two sheets of paper.

They got - I should say we got - more fun, on a riveting final day of tense, edgy, emotional, high-level athletic competition, than the average televised- sports addict gets in a month of Sundays.

This isn't mainstream sport, but it deserves a higher profile than it has in the pantheon of Winter Olympic events, and in 16 months, the people who may have settled for tickets to medal events in short track speed skating are going to find, perhaps to their surprise, that they won the lottery.

It was not possible to watch the men's 5,000-metre relay - the closing race of the three-day World Cup - without an elevated heartbeat. But almost every medal final in this sport, which has as much subtle bumping and hand-fighting as any wide receiver/cornerback battle for position in football, was edge-of- the-seat stuff.

Heck, the B Final of the 5,000 relay, a three-country tussle featuring the teams that didn't even qualify for the medal race, came down to a photo finish that could not separate first place from second. Five kilometres of skating, and a timing system that records to the thousandth of a second couldn't tell whether France or Netherlands crossed the line first, because they were both in at six minutes, 56.408 seconds.

And then the medal contenders skated out, 16 skaters from four nations circling and sprinting and push-starting their teammates in a scene of magnificently organized mayhem, and a scriptwriter couldn't have fashioned anything better, as the Americans and Canadians swooped around the final lap neck-and-neck until the sport's poster boy, Apolo Anton Ohno, outduelled Canadian star Charles Hamelin to win the weekend's lone gold medal for the U.S. team.

Canada, with eight trips to the podium from this World Cup meet, finished second only to short track powerhouse Korea - both in medals and fan support, for among the 4,753 fans who overran the lower bowl of the Coliseum on Sunday, the loudest and most numerous were raucously pro-Korea.

"The nice thing about this is it feels like the crowd is on top of you. It's real intense," said Ohno, the photogenic Seattle-born star, doing his own post- mortem on the Coliseum's performance as an Olympic venue. "The ice got better as the competition went on. It was a semi-packed house. It's going to be the hottest ticket at the Games."

Chances are, it's not going to outdo hockey in that vein, but it might give figure skating a run - and the two sports share the same ice surface on an alternating-day basis, which presents an enormous challenge to the ice-makers and set-up men who have to change the ice composition and put in and remove the boards, daily.

Logistics were a big part of the lessons Vanoc will have taken from the meet, everything from the performance of the boardless surround of padding, to press operations to timing and scoring, to translation and transcription services, to the extra half-inch of ice thickness needed for figure skating - necessitating as many as 30 transitions by the ice-making crew during the Games.

"The sports have always alternated days," said longtime figure skating judge and 2002 Canadian Olympic team chef de mission Sally Rehorick. "I remember the first one I was involved with in Albertville, the speed skaters complained about the figure skaters taking gouges out of the ice with their toe picks, and the figure skaters complained about the huge ruts at the ends of the [oval speedskating] track ... but the difference here is, these ice makers are tremendous, they really know what they're doing."

One thing Vanoc will not need to tinker with is the in-game presentation. Two bilingual announcers, speed skating dad Robert Laurie of Frederiction, N.B., and former skater and coach Danny Lemay of Montreal, who had never met until Friday, worked seamlessly side-by-side, handing off effortlessly from French to English, and made the arena experience a treat for the educated and educational for everyone else.

One test event down, 17 more to go this winter.

Vanoc will be delighted if they all go this well.