Witty Looks for the Silver Lining

How to feel? What to say?

Chris Witty won a second speedskating medal Thursday. She finished second in a race she was expected to win and thought she should have won.

Marianne Timmer of the Netherlands, a surprise winner at 1,500 meters, surprised again, winning at 1,000 meters, the distance at which Witty holds the world record.

Two Olympic medals--she finished third in the 1,500--aren’t bad, Witty said.

“After all, there are so many athletes in the world and it’s so hard to even get here,” she said. “Besides, a silver is a little shinier than a bronze.”

Then again, gold glows, and Witty said, “to be so close to gold . . . well, right now I’m a little bummed, I’m a little sad. I didn’t race a bad race, but I wasn’t perfect and Timmer was. She’s a good friend, and it’s hard to be sad when a good friend beats you.

“Timmer exceeded everyone’s expectations here. She skated so well that I’m a little jealous. I wish I was her.”

Instead, they are close friends who vacationed together with their boyfriends in Mexico last year.

Witty, 22, lives with Timmer, 23, when they are in the Netherlands, where Timmer’s father has a small sheep farm and his daughter takes care of the newborns when they are ill.

“I’m a little bit of a mother,” Timmer said of that nursing care after disappointing Witty’s parents and the rest of the Wisconsin Chris Crew at the M-Wave.

After setting a world record and lowering her personal best time by 2 1/2 seconds in the 1,500 meters, Timmer set an Olympic record of 1 minute 16.51 seconds in the 1,000.

Witty, who set the world record of 1:15.43 on much faster Calgary ice, clocked 1:16.79. Canada’s Catriona Le May Doan was third in 1:17.37.

The Dutch have now won five of the nine speedskating events and 11 medals overall. Witty owns the only two U.S. medals and is just getting started.

She already is talking about the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City and the coming of age of a young U.S. skating team--with an intermediate stop, she hopes, in Sydney as a member of the U.S. cycling team in the Summer Games of 2000.

Two medals, she said, “should hopefully establish my own name. I won’t have to live in such a shadow of the great Bonnie Blair, which isn’t such a bad thing, but I have my own career and I don’t compare. I don’t sit around saying I have to be the next Bonnie. Hopefully, people will now remember Chris Witty as Chris Witty more than anything.”

Witty might have underscored it with a gold, but she had a false start Thursday that might have played on her mind when she went back to the line.

Timmer, in the previous pairing, had already posted her time. Witty was in the last twosome and knew what she had to do.

“The first time the gun went off I felt really good, but once you have a false start you can’t try to anticipate,” she said. “You have to hold back so that you don’t false-start again. It’s kind of hard to do.”

Did she agree with the recall?

“I thought I held the line pretty good, but I might have been moving a little,” she said. “It was silly on my part.”

Would she have been fast enough to have won if she hadn’t been forced to hold back on the second start?

“I don’t know, it’s hard to say,” she said. “It’s a thousand meters. Only the first 100 or so may have been affected. My first split [18.2 seconds] was very solid.

“I know I’m capable of beating [Timmer’s] time, but I just wasn’t comfortable after the first lap. I tried to muscle my way through the corners. I got a little anxious. I’d have made up the two-tenths [by which she lost] if I had stayed relaxed. I know how I lost it, and that’s kind of hard to swallow.”

Coach Gerard Kemkers agreed with Witty’s analysis.

“I could see something wasn’t clicking,” he said. “Her will to win, her will to get to the finish line, was overtaking her execution a little bit. Chris knows and I know that she didn’t let her skating do what it needs to do.

“I also know that Chris is the strongest skater out there and should be able to beat that time fairly easy, but if you don’t relax and give your skating a chance--which is why Timmer did so well here--then you have problems. I mean, if she had skated well I’d be happy with the silver right now, but I probably have to go back to the hotel for an hour and think about it and then I’ll be up and cheering.”

Witty said it was all part of a learning experience that should serve her well in the future, just as she was toughened by those early years when her father lost his factory welding job and the family was struggling financially and she learned how to do without, even if it meant hanging in and continuing to skate with secondhand skates while hoping friends would pay her $35 annual club dues.

Tough? Yes. But being so close in a race that should have been hers was a new test.

“I thought maybe I had done it,” she said, of her feelings when she crossed the line, “but then I looked up, saw [she had lost by] two-tenths and said, ‘Oh no, not today, any other day but not today.’ I was disappointed, that’s for sure.”

Cheered, however, by the silver around her neck, she leaned over on the medal stand to offer congratulations to good friend Timmer and ask, “How do you want to celebrate tonight?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

MEDALISTS

Speedskating

WOMEN’S 1,000 METERS

Gold: Marianne Timmer, Netherlands

Silver: Chris Witty, United States

Bronze: Catriona LeMay Doan, Canada