What’s special about the men’s short track relay team this year?
Posted at 10:46 p.m.
“There are all our age differences… Well, there is my age difference with the others”, immediately corrected Charles Hamelin, 37, looking at the youngsters around him, who were looking at him at the same time. They all burst out laughing.
They had just qualified for the final, the final test of the Games, and the final test for Hamelin, next Wednesday at the National Indoor Stadium in Beijing.
Pascal Dion is 10 years younger; follow Maxime Laoun, 25, Steven Dubois, 24, and Jordan Pierre-Gilles, 23. Pierre-Gilles was left out as a substitute, but could well be in the final.
It should not have escaped, that one. Since the event was entered in Albertville in 1992, Canada has made six podiums in eight Games. The current team is ranked first in the world, but has seen mixed results over the past three years. After another tough night for the Canadian short track skating team, it was not a foregone conclusion for the men’s relay team. Nothing is ever a foregone conclusion in short track speed skating, as we saw in the mixed relay, where Canada was one of the favorites but was disqualified after contact. And as the Hungarians saw on Friday, they who are relegated to the B final, even if they have one of the best in the world in Shaolin Liu in their ranks.
It also came pretty close to ending badly. In the last third of the race, a member of the Chinese team tried to overtake Pascal Dion from inside. The Quebecer’s blade touched that of the Chinese, who found himself in the mattress.
“I wasn’t really worried. It’s a racing incident, it happens. I didn’t know if the Chinese were going to be advanced. Sounds like a good decision to me, it really depends on how the referee sees it, but that’s okay,” Dion said.
This decision therefore invites a fifth team instead of the usual four on an already quite busy ice.
“Won’t it be more chaotic still?”
“No, we’re used to it,” Hamelin replied. Of the five Olympic finals I made, four times, we were five teams. Sometimes there are even six of us. Yes, it’s more traffic, the ice will be more damaged, but it’s up to us to manage ourselves. »
The current team may not have the most number of individually ranked skaters, but they sit first in the World Cup, ahead of South Korea, Hungary and China.
Hamelin interrupted our interview so that the guys could listen, on the screen in the mixed zone, to the women’s 1,000 meters final – from which the Canadians were excluded. It was screaming very loudly when the Dutch Suzanne Schulting came to beat the Korean at the very end and win by 50 hundredths of a second. “Well no… Well no!!! Impossible !!! shouted Pierre-Gilles, obviously the team’s enthusiastic supplier of renewable energy.
These boys are really, really into sports, clearly…
For Laoun, of course, reaching the final has a special meaning, he whose athletic career was compromised by a triple fracture of the tibia, suffered on the ice in 2019. “Just being here was my ultimate goal. I thought for a while that I wouldn’t come back to competition, but not for long. But I was so well surrounded by the team, my family, I didn’t doubt for long. »
Dubois’ silver medal the other night eased the tension and gave confidence after the inexplicable fall of Dion, ranked number 1 in the world, in the 1000m.
“It can be more glorifying to win an individual medal, but in the relay, you can share with the team. It’s much better to celebrate in a group,” says Dion.
For Captain Hamelin, it’s an opportunity to show the country’s depth of talent and strength in the discipline. It was also his only real chance of a medal, and that’s good, it will literally be his last lap.
By Wednesday, he’s making sure to keep his world relaxed and in good spirits. It seems to have gone well.