Sweden’s Speedskating Hero Is Quick in the Turns, and With an Opinion

In the 10,000, skaters must push themselves to skate just below their maximum effort, and then hold on for dear life through 25 laps. Van der Poel’s training for the event differs from most of his competitors in that it includes no strength training. Instead, in the spring and summer he does enormous amounts of low-intensity training, like those ultramarathons and bike rides.

When speedskating season arrives in the fall and winter, van der Poel switches to high-intensity training, but mostly only speedskating itself. He estimates that he has skated the 10,000 five times a week since mid-October. His goal is to “skate flat,” meaning that he tries to cover each lap at the same speed.

He skates most of those on a 250-meter oval in Trollhättan, a city of about 60,000 on the Göta älv River in western Sweden. The oval’s curves are similar to those of a standard size oval, but the straights are much shorter. That extra practice on the curves allows van der Poel to take them tighter than others skaters do, carving a more efficient line through the course.

Van der Poel believes he will win another gold medal on Friday, but he sounds sincere when he says that, despite competing in a sport where success can be defined by how you perform at the Olympics every four years, he does not believe it is healthy to be driven by athletic outcomes. “What I hold myself responsible for is I’m going to try to win as bad as I can, but I’m going to be very, very kind to myself, realizing that I will probably fail winning,” he says.

And how is he trying to win? There, for perhaps the only time, he does not have to think long and hard about how he wants to answer, or how the question connects to his sporting philosophy. When he finally races, that is when things get simple.

“We skate it like we always skate it,” he says. “We skate flat and we skate fast.”