Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on the Inside Vancouver blog, as part of special coverage of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Canadian fans celebrate after Kristina Groves captures silver in ladies' 1500-meter speed skating.
With Team Canada licking its wounds after a men’s hockey defeat, it’s important to remember that every cloud has a silver lining. And today that silver came courtesy of Kristina Groves, who finished second in the ladies’ 1500-meter speed skating finals at the Richmond Oval, bringing home another silver medal for Canada. I zipped out to Richmond on the Canada Line this afternoon to see the action. After a week of canvasing Olympic parties and Olympic houses, I was excited to finally be among the few, the proud, the ticketed. This would be my first time inside an Olympic event, and – with several top Canadian skaters competing – chances for gold were good.
Wearing more orange than a highway crew, Dutch fans get into party mode before speed skating finals at the Richmond Oval.
But first I had to get past the Dutch. On the approach to the Oval, which commands a scenic spot on the Richmond waterfront, I started spotting them, clad in orange capes, robes and goofy hats. For a nation of only 16 million people, the Netherlands produces an extraordinary amount of skating talent. Today, it seemed as if most of Amsterdam were on hand to cheer their ladies on.
As luck would have it, my seats were smack dab in the middle of the Dutch contingent. Before the race, the crowd was boisterous, toasting copious amounts of what I presume was Heineken and blasting away on improvised air horns. But once the first pair of skaters lined up on the track, the Dutch grew deadly serious. The atmosphere was a world away from the wild scene inside Olympic hockey games. Don’t let the orange jumpsuits fool you: The crew from the Netherlands is all business.
The ice is cleaned during "half-time" of the ladies' 1500 meter finals at the Richmond Oval.
The first few sets of skaters whizzed around the track while the Dutch fans looked on, duly noting split times and other arcane speed skating details lost on me. Then, the first Dutch skater slid up to the starting line. From the moment Annette Gerritsen took off, a wave of horn blasting, cheering and bright orange pandemonium in the stands escorted her round and round the track. Heads snapped as she whipped by, eyes narrowed on the striding figure in orange and black. Gerritsen set the mark to beat early on, and the Dutch never let up.
The real excitement came at the end of the event, when the last few pairs of skaters squared off. Eventual Dutch gold medal winner Ireen Wust registered a blazing time, well in front of her closest competition. Canadian Brittany Schussler then took to the ice but lost steam at the end of the race and finished well back of the pack. Then, to a furious clanging of cowbells, Canadian Kristina Groves skated to the starting line.
I’ll confess that up until this point I had been a bit underwhelmed with my first Olympic experience. This might seem counterintuitive, but live and up-close the event didn’t seem nearly as dramatic as on TV. There were none of the instant replays, none of the slow-mo shots of athletes grimacing in exertion, none of the fancy graphics and music that had kept me glued to the set for the last week. And, with all deference to the Dutch and speed skating, I couldn’t see what the big deal was about plowing around an icy circle on a set of extra long blades.
Canadian fans rise to their feet during the final heats of the speed skating finals.
But when Groves took off, all the excitement, the patriotism and the spirit that surrounds the Olympics was – just for a moment – channeled right into the Richmond Oval. The venue shook, with enough force to make me worry about the integrity of its big eco-friendly roof, made out of more than one million board feet of pine beetle-damaged Canadian lumber. I suppose this kind of thing happens whenever a Canadian athlete goes for gold in an event here in Vancouver. All the hoopla around the Games, if only for an instant, makes perfect sense.
Groves was agonizingly close to the gold medal mark for most of the race but slipped a few tenths of a second behind in the home stretch. Still, it was good enough for silver, not to mention a timely lesson. The Olympics, at root, is about the sports. If you’re not out there experiencing the events live, you’re missing a big piece of the picture. And, contrary to popular belief, it’s not too late to get tickets. VANOC’s fan-to-fan marketplace, the official ticket resale clearinghouse, still lists tickets for nearly every event (though you may have to pay a bit extra for procrastinating).
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