Time has caught up to Canadian speed skater Ted-Jan Bloemen, and the future only looks tougher

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Halfway through the 10,000 metres on Friday night, defending gold medalist Ted-Jan Bloemen tried signalling to his coaches that he was done.

They tried signalling back that he should press on.

But by the next time he came around the oval, Bloemen’s trying was over.

“I shouldn’t like to say, but he shut her down a little bit,” was how Bloemen’s coach Bart Schouten put it.

“I had to push too hard to make [medal] lap times. So I made the decision to save myself for the team pursuit,” was how Bloemen put it.

However you prefer to put it, it adds up to the same thing – a tremendous disappointment in the 10,000-metre long-track speed skating race from the guy who was Canada’s surprise package at the Pyeongchang Games in 2018. Bloemen placed eighth Friday, following up on a 10th-place finish in the 5,000 earlier in the week.

Bloemen wasn’t just beaten on Friday. He finished more than 30 seconds behind the winner, Sweden’s Nils van der Poel. Had they been skating head-to-head in the same pair, the Swede would have lapped the defending champion. Patrick Roest of the Netherlands took the silver, Italian Davide Ghiotto the bronze.

Bloemen and Schouten came armed with explanations. Bloemen had been right on track until he caught a bug – not COVID-19 – in December. That screwed up his training. He never did get his endurance legs back under him.

According to his coach, Bloemen is still a monster if the distance is 3,000 metres. Unfortunately, he didn’t race that distance.

Also, van der Poel. What are you supposed to do about a rival who’s setting world records on a “low-end rink” (Schouten’s words) such as the one in Beijing? Nothing, that’s what.

They’re all reasonable excuses. And they don’t cut it for a gold medalist.

That’s the only problem with having a remarkable athletic career, as opposed to a mediocre one. You’ve got a lot further to fall and, once you start, nothing soft to land on.

Bloemen was clearly feeling the distance between what he expected to happen here and what did. All the other skaters – including sixth-place teammate Graeme Fish – were happy to discuss their races. Bloemen tried skipping out on his media obligations. He returned after a couple of rounds of coaxing from Schouten. Once he returned, he was so mild and affable you wondered why he hadn’t just done that in the first place.

Fish is a good example of a competitor who feels he has it all yet to come. He’s just 24. He briefly held the world record at this distance.

He had COVID-19 recently and has only just returned to competition. He also signalled to the coaches during his race – for a trash can. He was throwing up into it when the next pair started.

Afterward, Fish was delighted – “I love pain,” he said. “I’m already about [skating] another one.”

There’s a man who’s looking forward to a brighter future. Bloemen carried himself like a man who’s trying to avoid getting hit in the face by whatever comes next.

In a visual metaphor that was a bit too on the nose, he was standing by the finish line as van der Poel finished his remarkable race.

The garrulous Swede has been to this Olympic speed skating competition what Bloemen was to the last one, only better. Plus, he makes news.

Van der Poel rattled the speed skating world in Beijing on and off the ice. In a routine presser, he accused the Dutch skating federation of “immoral” behaviour in trying to influence ice makers to set up conditions that suits its skaters. It was a story so niche only its mother could love it, but it proved van der Poel’s iconoclastic outsider bona fides. You need those to be a proper Olympic hero.

He rattled it again with his racing. His up-from-the-grave comeback in the 5,000 to win gold earlier in the Games was one sort of show. Friday’s 12½-minute procession into history was another sort.

It’s hard to build up any atmosphere during a 10,000-metre speed skating race. Turn the lights down low enough, and it’s a nice, quiet place to nap. But van der Poel’s run into the record book was so electric that even the few hundred bored-stiff apparatchiks in the stands could not sit still through it.

Along with improving his own world record, van der Poel obliterated Bloemen’s Olympic record.

Van der Poel now has the two fastest 10,000s in history. Fish has the third. His appraisal of the Swede: “No one’s even close.”

So where does that leave Bloemen?

While van der Poel was doing his backstage victory lap, Bloemen was trying to salvage something – anything – from the house fire his Games has become.

“The 5 and the 10K right now are a bit too long for me. At the Olympics, that’s disappointing. But it’s not over. We still have team pursuit to come. … The 3K is a distance I can handle right now.”

That’s great. All medal possibilities are great. If Bloemen can help Canada win another, it’s a major achievement.

But it’s still a huge letdown for a guy who was once the world’s best at what he does, one who is running out of runway in a hurry.

Bloemen is 35. The three medalists on Friday night were, in order, 25, 26 and 28. This isn’t going to get harder. Pretty soon, it will be impossible.

Bloemen wasn’t biting on the question of what’s next: “For the future, that’s something that I’ll have to evaluate at another time.” His coach, Schouten, thought he might have two more years in him. And he sounded a lot less than sure about that.

One might ask: Two years to do what?

There is nothing wrong with making a living at athletics if you aren’t good enough to win. Anyone who’s good enough to get on any type of Olympic team is near the pinnacle of their profession. They have earned respect before they get on the field of play.

But when you’ve won two Olympic medals, held world records at two distances and carried a national program on your back, spending a couple more seasons playing out the string seems a just little beneath your dignity.

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