A Happy Return for Van Velde

Fortunately for Dutch sprinter Gerard van Velde, countryman Rintje Ritsma, a three-medal Olympian, talked him into giving speedskating another try.

Otherwise, Van Velde would have been selling cars back home in Holland and somebody else would have won the gold medal Saturday in the men’s 1,000-meter race at the Utah Olympic Oval.

Maybe it would have been Jan Bos, another Dutchman, who finished second in this race four years ago at Nagano. Maybe it would have been Jeremy Wotherspoon, the Canadian favorite. Maybe it would have been one of the Americans, Casey FitzRandolph, who’d won the 500 last Tuesday, or Kip Carpenter. Maybe even Joey Cheek, the former inline roller skater from Greensboro, N.C.

But Van Velde was here to skate--”He skated the race of his life,” Bos said--and all the others had to settle for something other than gold.

Skating early in the fast group, Van Velde uncorked a world-record time of 1 minute 7.18 seconds, then watched as, two by two, all the supposedly faster skaters took shots at it.

Carpenter’s first 200 meters weren’t fast enough, although he skated the fastest 1,000 of his life.

FitzRandolph, paired with Bos, had a great start, 16.09 seconds, fastest of the day, and was flying at a world-record pace after 600 meters, then bobbled on an inner turn. Bos went on to win their race but couldn’t beat his teammate’s time.

Cheek too went out at a record pace and, although he couldn’t sustain it, skated his fastest 1,000.

Canadian Mike Ireland and Norwegian Adne Sondral skated ordinary times, Ireland touching the ice, and finally it was down to Erben Wennemars, another Dutchman, and Wotherspoon, the World Cup leader who began the day as the world-record holder.

Wotherspoon, however, is having a Dan Jansen-like Olympics. He fell at the start of Tuesday’s race, and Saturday, after tying FitzRandolph’s quick opener, got too far forward and nearly fell again.

So when it was over, it was a surprised Van Velde atop the podium. Bos took second, as he had at Nagano, and Cheek gave the U.S. men their fourth medal of these Games, the bronze.

“I’ve never been on the podium,” Van Velde said, awe in his voice. “I’m always fourth.”

Indeed, he was fourth in the 500.

“I missed by 2/100ths of a second,” he said. “I was really disappointed Tuesday.”

Van Velde has been disappointed before. Fourth in the 1,000 and fifth in the 500 in 1992 at Albertville, he was so disappointed in 1998, when he couldn’t adjust to the new clapskates, that he quit speedskating and took a job as a car salesman, missing the Nagano Games.

“I did some marathon skating too [a form of racing popular in Holland] but marathon is not good for a sprinter,” he said. “I was always hurting. So for about a year and a half, I quit. Then at the end of ’99 Rintje Ritsma asked me to skate for his team. ‘You’re talented, just try it again,’ he said. So I tried it.”

Succeeded too.

“This season was going very well but now, now this is incredible,” he said. “I just wanted a medal. I wasn’t thinking about winning, I just didn’t want to be fourth again. I’m 30 [31, actually] and I thought this might be my last Olympic race so I skated it [as if it was]. When I crossed the finish line, I had the feeling I did everything I could.

“While I was skating, I didn’t think my race was very special. I never had any feeling I was going very fast. I said, ‘Just keep skating,’ and at the finish line I saw my time and it was incredible. I knew it would be tough to beat.”

Impossible, on this day at least.