Yahoo Sports Daily hosts Caroline Fenton and Jason Fitz are joined by American Olympian Apolo Ohno to discuss the current skating conditions at the Olympic games and Corinne Stoddard’s recent struggles. Watch the full episode of Yahoo Sports Daily on YouTube or YahooSports.TV.
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Video Transcript
The ice condition is not what they’re normally used to.
So every Olympic Games, everyone’s comes in with their coats.
It’s, it’s very warm.
The underneath the ice compressors is a specific set temperature.
The ice meister is what they call them.
They control these elements really well, but with all the new lights, all the Olympic activity and more focus, everything changes.
And as a result, this is also Stoddard’s, I think something that she just has seen earlier today.
She j- she just did- she rushed, right?
And that’s the one thing the Olympics does, is you could be world champion, World Cup champion, when you come to the Games, there’s just this added layer of both expectation and pressure, and if I was gonna simplify, she j- she rushed her pushing, right?
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She didn’t need to attack too early, meaning she didn’t need to make that pass.
and then she has a, a little bit of a pattern where she swings her right arm, and when she’s in control, she’s very fast, she’s very explosive.
But a little bit too hard of a swing, her upper b- her upper body sh- shifts, which causes the rotation of the body, and that’s exactly what happened.
So psychologically, this is a really challenging point, right?
Because you’ve got almost, you know, three falls back to back to back in the same day.
I think this team would have actually medaled at least s- at least bronze, maybe silver, and possibly even gold if they had made it to the final.
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But that’s all done, right?
They can no longer control those components.
So it, it She now has to shift her psychology.
She has to reset this going forward.
The ice conditions are, specifically for short track speed skating, are really, really, really important.
Some athletes skate very well on what we would consider to be soft ice, meaning a little bit warmer temperature.
The first thing that I noticed when I walked into the rink this morning was I noticed after they were Zamboni-ing the ice, you know, when you see them pouring that kinda hot water as it’s dragging across the ice surface and they’re shaving underneath, the, the water was not drying as fast as it normally does.
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It was just staying wet.
So that just signified to me that, A, either if the under- the compressors underneath are actually the right temperature, and those are the metrics that are working, but on top it’s not drying.
And then in the other part is they pour q- water in the corners of the ice.
Now, that just does two things.
It does, number one, it helps self-heal the ice.
So you see the athletes that are putting their arms down as they go around those corners, that’s the highest amount of pressure is at the apex.
The water is supposed to help that as the grooves get cut through the ice on each corner, it’s almost like a self-healing mechanism by pouring a little bit of that warm water through the corners.
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And the second part is it helps the athletes grip.
So it provides an additional layer of grip as they torque really hard on that right leg.
The ice conditions plays a big role, but at the end of the day, this is what the Olympic Games are about, right?
You prepare for the uncertainty.
Short track is a masterclass in stoicism, right?
Whatever you think that you can prepare for, at some point, you have to just disregard the things, for example, the ice conditions.
Everyone’s skating on the same ice conditions.
So either you can be sensitive about it, or you can step up and say, “I need to adjust, I need to pivot, I need to figure out how I can still perform to my absolute best.”