Skip to main content
Open this photo in gallery:

Ted-Jan Bloemen reacts after his heat during the men's speedskating 5,000-metre race at the Winter Olympics in Beijing on Feb. 6.Sue Ogrocki/The Associated Press

Speed skater Ted-Jan Bloemen stood shattered and confused, unable to explain why his first race at the Beijing Olympics went so terribly wrong on Sunday, and whether he can bounce back before the next one.

He entered Sunday’s 5,000-metre event believing he was capable of skating to an Olympic-record time and winning another medal for Canada. He is, after all, one of the world’s best. Instead he finished 10th and left the ice gutted and perplexed.

Bloemen is one of the top men on a Canadian long-track team that has lots of medal potential in Beijing across both genders. He won silver in this event at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, plus a gold in the 10,000-metre event. The 35-year-old began Sunday’s race in Beijing gliding around the National Speed Skating Oval at a very promising pace.

Beijing Winter Olympics: Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris leads the way as three Canadians advance to men’s slopestyle final

“I went out exactly according to plan, that was going really well for the first four laps and then just things started to unravel for me,” Bloemen said after the race. “And I have no explanation for it right now.”

He was born in Leiderdorp, the Netherlands, and used to skate within the highly competitive Dutch program before he decided to move to Canada – his father’s native country – in 2014. He trained in Calgary, became a big part of the national team, and his medals at the 2018 Olympics snapped Canada’s 86-year Olympic medal dry spell in the men’s 5,000- and 10,000-metre events.

In the 5,000 metres, the men register their times by racing in pairs. Their long strides look graceful as they click and clack over the ice, but over 12.5 exhaustive laps of the 400-metre oval, lactic acid fills the legs and soon pain is coursing throughout the body. Only the fittest and mentally strongest endure. Bloemen is one of those – he’s No. 2 in the World Cup standing for long distances. He once held the world record in the 5,000 metres.

Typically, the fastest competitors go in the later race pairings of an event, but Patrick Roest of the Netherlands threw down the gauntlet skating in the fifth of 10 pairings on Sunday. He raced to an Olympic-record time of 6 minutes 9.31 seconds, raising the bar for everyone.

Bloemen was undaunted. This was not unexpected.

Bloemen raced in the second-last pairing inside the oval, a modern oblong venue nicknamed the Ice Ribbon, against Ruslan Zakharov of Russia. He started quick and was going well, but a few laps in, the lap times were becoming harder to keep. It didn’t bother him at first; he was convinced he’d catch up. But that whole-body pain of a 5,000-metre race was intensifying. He lost his technique in the turn, and his upper body started to lift. He drifted back too much on his heels.

“Lap 6 or something, I started to push a little bit extra to get the lap time back and then suddenly I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t do it,’” Bloemen recalled. “Then it really started to hurt. Then the lap times went really went up, bad, bad, bad.”

He finished in a time of 6:19.11, more than 10 seconds slower than superstar gold medalist Nils van der Poel of Sweden, who raced in the final pairing to a blistering time of 6:08.04. Roest took silver and Norway’s Hallgeir Engebraaten won bronze in 6:09.88.

“I’m really disappointed. I felt like I had a 6:06 or a 6:07 in me today, and it just didn’t happen,” Bloemen said. “And I’ve got to figure out what happened.”

Bloemen’s coach didn’t have answers, either, and said they would sleep on it before doing video analysis. He said Bloemen had a respiratory illness in January that wasn’t COVID – Bloemen had tested negative for that – but it interrupted his skating a little.

His training looked great in Beijing, the coach said, and none of the experts on the long-track team suspected anything was wrong going into this race. He has never known Bloemen to be so perplexed after a race.

“You can see what went wrong on a video, that’s fairly easy to see what went wrong in technique,” said Canadian men’s coach Bart Schouten. “But what caused it, and what’s the fix? That’s where we’re at right now.”

Bloemen still has the 10,000-metre race and the team pursuit to go in Beijing.

“If Ted’s himself, he should be contending for a medal,” Schouten said.

It’s not typical for Bloemen to come away from a race not knowing right away what was off, Shouten said, but added Bloemen has a strong belief in himself.

There isn’t much time to bounce back before he tries to defend his Olympic gold medal in the 10,000 metres on Friday.

Does this result change the way Bloemen feels about his chances at these Games?

“Well right now, yes, but I’ll find a way to deal with that,” Bloemen said. “I’m going to do a cooldown right now and gather my thoughts and make a new plan.”

Our Olympic team has a daily newsletter that lands in your inbox every morning during the Games. Sign up today to join us in keeping up with medals, events and other news.

Follow related authors and topics

Authors and topics you follow will be added to your personal news feed in Following.

Interact with The Globe