His Impact Is Frozen in Time

Marc Norman knows perfect ice.

He can spot it when his life depends on it as he hangs off a frozen waterfall 200 feet up, looking for a spot to support his climbing gear.

He can make it too. Norman is the main iceman at the Utah Olympic Oval, the fastest ice on earth. The arena holds eight of the 10 world records in Olympic events--and today, there’s an opportunity for one more, in the 10,000-meter men’s race.

Norman, a former competitive speedskater, isn’t taking any chances with the slippery stuff. Two days before the races, he stayed at the arena until about midnight, directing his crew as they shaved bumps off the oval, flooded it with hoses and cranked the surface of the rink down to about 9 degrees.

The $30-million venue boasts more than six times the cooling capacity of most hockey rinks, an air-purification system to keep dust off the sheet and a computer network that calls Norman’s cell phone the instant anything goes wrong.

Norman, 28, is so obsessed with frozen water that his coworkers have nicknamed him the “Ice Meister.” He usually arrives at the rink at 7 a.m. and stays until training sessions end 14 hours later.

Even the water at the oval--1,000 tons flowing through 33 miles of pipe embedded in the rink’s concrete floor--is complex. Impurities are removed by a deionizing unit, then salt is added to lower the freezing point below 18 degrees, making the ice clear.

Norman’s ice has the perfect blend of grip and glide.

Grippy ice is a little soft, allowing skaters to dig in and build speed. Ice that glides resists the blades, so racers can slide with less effort. Sprinters want grip and endurance racers demand glide, so Norman tweaks the ice for each distance.

“That’s very special,” said gold medalist Anni Friesinger of Germany, who said the ice helped her break her own world record in Wednesday’s 1,500. “Sometimes when the ice is very fast you break away in the corners, and here you still have grip.”