Six hundredths of a second; this is the gap that separated Canadian Ivanie Blondin from a gold medal, after 16 laps of the mass start in long track speed skating, Saturday at the Beijing Olympics.
Blondin and Irene Schouten were neck and neck but the Dutch skater edged the Canadian by a toe length to the finish line in the final event at the Beijing National Speed Skating Oval.
For the 31-year-old athlete from Ottawa, it is a second medal at the 2022 Winter Games. With the help of Isabelle Weidemann and Valérie Maltais, Blondin won gold in the pursuit per team.
“It’s good to finally be able to win an individual medal. My road has been long and winding,” said Blondin, who crashed in her mass start semi-final at the Pyeongchang Games four years ago.
“I’m just really happy at this point to bring home a medal for my country. »
The medal was Canada’s 25th since the start of the Games.
For his part, Maltais, who dominated most of the first laps of the track, as well as momentarily at the end, concluded the competition in sixth place.
In the men’s final, Canadians Jordan Belchos and Antoine Gélinas-Beaulieu finished 13th and 15th, respectively.
Earlier in the day, Canadian Noah Bowman had improved his Olympic rank in the freestyle halfpipe event, but not enough to make it to the podium.
In difficult weather conditions at Genting Snow Park, Bowman finished fourth in the halfpipe.
Bowman, who finished fifth at the 2014 Sochi Games and 2018 Pyeongchang Games, scored 84.75 points on his second run.
The Calgary skier was unable to improve his score on his third and final run. As a result, he stopped just two points from the bronze medal, won by American Alex Ferreira.
In his first Games, Brendan Mackay of Calgary took ninth place with a score of 65.60. Mackay crashed on his first run and injured his rib cage.
Simon D’Artois of Whistler, BC, settled for 10th place with a score of 63.75. He improved his Olympic result, after signing 13th in Pyeongchang.
While Canada failed to win a medal in the men’s halfpipe event, it is in a good position to add one to its total in the men’s four-man bobsleigh.
The Canadian team, consisting of Justin Kripps, Ryan Sommer, Cam Stones and Benjamin Coakwell, finished the first two runs with a combined time of 1:57.38.
Kripps and his teammates currently find themselves in third place with two more runs to go. They are 38 hundredths of a second from first place and hold a lead of 17 hundredths ahead of the crew of German Christoph Hafer.
Kripps won gold in the two-man bobsleigh at the Pyeongchang Games.
In cross-country skiing, in the 30 km mass start event, Quebecer Olivier Léveillé finished in 27th place, in 1:15:54.3. Remi Drolet of British Columbia was 35th in 1:16:27.1.