Valérie Maltais of Canada competes in the women's 1,500m speedskating race.Ben Curtis/The Associated Press
It was a night of elation and heartbreak for Canadian speed skating, as long track’s Valérie Maltais won a surprise bronze medal, but the short track team missed its last two podium opportunities.
While Maltais had already won two medals at this Olympics, she was not viewed as a likely medal contender in the women’s 1,500m. However, despite a more sluggish start than she had hoped, the 35-year-old found her rhythm in the middle of the race and finished with a time of 1:54.40. It was the fastest race to that point with 10 skaters left. And by the time the final two competitors took to the line, Maltais was still hanging onto a podium position.
She watched from rinkside as the Japanese favourite, Miho Takagi, rocketed around the first lap, but then steadily began to lose steam. When the final times flashed on the arena screens, Maltais was still sitting in bronze.
The Dutch skater Antoinette Rijpma-de Jong finished first with 1:54.09 and Norway’s Ragne Wiklund was second in 1:54.15.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, Maltais grinned for eight minutes straight.
“It’s a great surprise today,” she said. “It’s a race that I’ve had a hard time finding the right gear and today I found patience.”
This is Maltais’s fifth Olympic medal, and her third in Milan Cortina. Heading into these Games, Maltais was focused on winning an individual medal. Both her previous two Olympic finishes – a silver in Sochi and gold in Beijing – were team races.
In Milan, Maltais checked off her goal in her first event, winning bronze – and Canada’s first medal – in the 3,000m. Once this happened, Maltais said she had a conversation with her mental coach about next steps.
“I was like ‘Man, I feel so good … like, really good physically,’ and he was like, ‘How about you aiming for individual medals?’” she recalls.
With this shift in mindset, she said she showed up for the 1,500m believing she was a contender: “I feel so good physically, I’m just excited. … I’m having this mentality of just: I’m not afraid to hurt here. And to just lift those legs in the corner.”
Maltais, who also defended her gold from Beijing with a win in the team pursuit in Milan, will have one more shot at a medal in these Olympics in the women’s mass start on Saturday.
Maltais will have an edge over many of the other skaters in the race, because she is a former short track skater. (Her silver medal from the Sochi Games was in short track’s 3,000m team relay. She is one of only a handful of athletes in the world who have won Olympic medals in both short and long-track.)
Mass start is the only long track event where skaters start at the same time and the winner is the one who crosses the line first. Typically, long track racing is a fight against the clock, with the fastest recorded time winning. By contrast, short track racers skate against each other and the sport not only requires speed but also strategy as competitors jostle for position.
Canada has one of the world’s strongest short track programs, but on Friday night, the team finished its Olympic Games with back-to-back disappointment.
First, medal favourite Courtney Sarault – who has already won two silvers and two bronzes in Milan – caught a rut in the ice and crashed into the boards in the semi-finals. It was a chaotic race where more than half of the skaters fell. And this followed an even more dramatic quarter-final round, where two skaters had to be removed from the ice by medical teams, including Poland’s Kamila Sellier who took a horrifying kick to the eye area with a blade.
Speaking afterwards, Sarault said that she clipped blades with someone at the beginning of the race, which stripped her edge, so she was already not as stable when she hit the rough patch of ice.
“When my one stable foot took that crack, there was no centre of gravity to recover from it,” she said. “It was shock and heartbreak all at the same time.”
With short track being so unpredictable, 25-year-old Sarault said Friday’s disappointment has helped put her other medals into perspective.
“The fact that I was this consistent this Games is truly unbelievable. I’m really proud of myself still,” she said.
In one last blow, the Canadians finished fourth in the men’s 5,000m relay – an event that the team won at the Beijing Olympics.
Said Maxime Laoun afterwards: “We kind of worked four years for that. It’s a one-shot deal and it just really sucks because I feel that we’re really a strong team and we just didn’t get to show it on the ice,” he said. “I know we’ll bounce back and we’ll be better in a couple hours, but for now it’s really hard.”
Still, Canada’s short track squad is finishing the Games with five medals – one shy of the record set in 2002 in Salt Lake City.
Long track’s last day is Saturday, with the men’s and women’s mass start.
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