Monday, October 31, 2022

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I did not take many photos of them actually racing as my mobile device camera isn't great at capturing events at sport speeds, but the one above came out mostly okay.

I attended the Saturday and Sunday days of the World Cup Short Track Speed Skating competition held here in my city. It is the first of six world cup events in this discipline.

I arrived on Saturday about 10 minutes before the doors opened, I went to the food truck to buy a poutine with sausage. The sausage wasn't very good, and when I got home I noticed I got charged 54$ for it. I guess I hadn't paid close attention when my card was charged; I'll be sure not to make this mistake again.

On Saturday I was in section 12 (row C seat 21) and on Sunday section 10 (row C seat 18); the latter brought me more central to the oval. The first final and medals awarded had Suzanne Schulting from The Netherlands winning the gold medal in 1500m distance:

Beside her is Kim Gilli, silver medal, from Korea and Kristen Santos-Griswold from USA; the latter in previous seasons was simply Kristen Santos.

A Canadian, Steven Dubois, won the silver medal in the men's 1500m:
Those are two Koreans who won the gold (Park Ji Won) and bronze (Hong Kyung Hwan).

There was a 1000m distance series of races on Saturday and no one of any skaters that I follow won in either of the men's or women's races.

On Sunday there was 500m finals and a second batch of 1000m finals and then finally the men's and women's relay races.

Here is what it looked like at the start of a 1000m race from where I was sitting:
Notable from these races was Steven Dubois winning the 500m men's and Canada's Pascal Dion winning the men's 1000m. Also, Suzanne Schulting won the 1000m women's.

Our Canadian's women's relay team won silver and our men's relay team won bronze, but through a tough break for the Italian team who placed third but was penalized.

Perhaps next year I'll consider buying my seat at the end of the oval, rather than at the midpoint of the long side.

The next competition is this coming weekend in Salt Lake City, and the next one is the weekend following, also at Salt Lake City. The first weekend is a World Cup while the second weekend is called Four Continents. There is a Four Continents race because there is also a European Championship that excludes the outer four continents. All of the events are live streamed, so I'll see about watching the races going forward, from home.

2 comments:

ghost said...

i imagine that was a good time. im always impressed by those events at the winter olympics. such strength and speed.

mez said...

I love watching the speed skaters. I don't generally watch a lot of Olympics, but whenever I catch the speed skating events, it's mesmerizing to me.