BEIJING — A flummoxed Ted-Jan Bloemen wants to figure out what went wrong before his signature race in the Olympic Games.
The Canadian speedskater faded from medal position to 10th in Sunday's 5,000 metres — a distance he won a silver medal in four years ago — and wasn't sure why.
"I was going really well for the first four laps, and then just things started to unravel for me and I have no explanation for it right now," Bloemen said after the race.Â
"I couldn't hold the lap times and then soon after that, I really started to struggle. That shouldn't happen."
The reigning Olympic champion in the 10,000 metres races it Friday in Beijing.
"I'm going to do a cooldown right now and gather my thoughts. Make a new plan," Bloemen said. "I didn't plan for this."
Skating in the penultimate pairing, Bloemen ranked first after lap three of the 5k at the National Speed Skating Oval. He began hemorrhaging time, however, in the seventh lap and couldn't recover it in the remaining five.
World-record holder Nils van der Poel of Sweden continued his domination of men's distance races this season winning gold in an Olympic record time of six minutes 8.84 seconds.
The Swede was almost a second off the pace set by Dutchman Patrick Roest with a lap to go.
Van der Poel closed with a monster bell lap and beat runner-up Roest by almost half a second for the title. Norway's Hallgeir Engebraaten took bronze 1.04 seconds back of the victor.
Bloemen's time of 6:19.11 was almost eight seconds slower than his silver-medal time in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
He ranks second in the World Cup men's distance standings this season behind van der Poel having finished second and third in both 5k races.
"I'm really disappointed," Bloemen said. "I felt like I had a 6:06 or seven in me today. It just didn't happen. I've got to figure out what happened. I don't know yet."
When the 35-year-old from Calgary sat down on the ice-side pads, he threw up his hands in exasperation during a conversation with coach Bart Schouten.
"It's not that easy to come up with an answer right now," Schouten said. "We did not see this coming."
Bloemen was ill with flu-like symptoms for two weeks in January. The skater didn't test positive for COVID-19, Schouten said, but lost a couple weeks of training.
"The training race last week and training this week didn't indicate that was going to be a factor," Schouten said. "We saw him lose his skating position and his technique in the fourth full lap, so that was a little early. That's not normal for him.
"It might have been a race where it just didn't come together for him. So if that was the case, then we'll expect a good 10k out of him, expect a good team pursuit out of him."
Bloemen held the 5k world record for almost four years before van der Poel bettered it by three-tenths of a second Dec. 3 in Salt Lake City.
Bloemen became only the second Canadian man to win Olympic speedskating gold in an individual distance when he upset Dutch star Sven Kramer for the 10k title in 2018.
Unable to find a foothold in the powerhouse Dutch speedskating system, Bloemen moved from the Netherlands to Calgary in 2014.
His father born in Bathurst, N.B., provided Bloemen an avenue to compete for Canada, but he also obtained his Canadian citizenship and married his Dutch wife, Marlinde, in Calgary.
The couple had daughter Fiene following his Pyeongchang triumph.
"The good thing about Ted is he's always believed in himself," Schouten said.Â
"Even in the Netherlands when he got kicked out of team after team, he believed in himself and he tried to find a different way to become better and bring out what he believed he had inside himself.
"There's five days to the 10,000 metres, which is not a lot of time, but Ted has a strange belief in himself that I think will help him turn this around."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 6, 2022.
Donna Spencer, The Canadian Press
