The U.S. short-track speedskaters saw one of their best medal chances slip away almost before the real racing began Thursday.
With two experienced holdovers from the team that won the silver medal in Lillehammer four years ago, Northbrook native Andy Gabel and U.S. flagbearer Eric Flaim, the men’s 5,000-meter relay shaped up as a strong event for the United States. But the preponderance of youth on the team meant that coach Jeroen Otter had to start two rookies as well.
The burden fell on 18-year-old Californian Rusty Smith and 20-year-old Tom O’Hare of St. Louis. With about 30 laps to go in the 7-minute race, O’Hare stepped on one of the plastic cones that mark the out-of-bounds zone and went down in a heap.
Two of the world’s best teams–defending champion Italy and South Korea–were in the semifinal heat, and within seconds there was far too much ice between the U.S. foursome and the other three to make up.
Making matters even worse, Gabel, who led off the relay, later inadvertently took a chunk out of the middle of O’Hare’s skate blade when he kicked it during an exchange. After the race ended, Gabel was the first man to glide over and drape a comforting arm over his teammate’s shoulder.
“Nobody goes down on purpose,” Otter said. “Tommy O’Hare is not a guy who falls a lot. He’s steady in training, steady in competition. Maybe he lost concentration by focusing on the teams in front of him rather than on the ice.
“It looked all year like this was a better team, with more depth and better conditioning, than ’94. It’s going to be more than a couple of days before I get over this one.”
O’Hare, competing in his first major international meet, was crestfallen after the race.
“It’s a routine thing you learn, not to step on the block,” he said. “It’s a letdown not so much for myself–I can get over it. I feel bad for the other guys because I feel like I let them down. But they were great about it. They got behind me right away.”
The relay was the last medal chance for Flaim, who turns 30 next month. Flaim, the only person of either gender from any country to win Olympic medals in both the long-track and short-track disciplines, did not qualify for any individual events in Nagano.
“I’m a little disappointed, but that’s the way things go sometimes,” Flaim said. “It was a real accomplishment just to get here.”
Canada, South Korea, China and Italy qualified for Saturday’s relay final.
Annie Perreault of Canada won the gold medal and Yang Yang of China took the silver in the bizarre finale of the women’s 500-meter pack race. A Chinese skater, Chunlu Wang, failed to finish the race and Canadian Isabelle Charest was disqualified for impeding the progress of another skater, giving the bronze medal to the winner of the consolation final, Lee-Kyung Chun of South Korea.
Erin Gleason was the only one of three U.S. women to make it out of the first heats of the 500, but she failed to advance beyond the quarterfinal.
Gabel is the last U.S. man standing in the 500 meters, which he considers his best event. He got through the initial qualifying heat of the race Thursday with a deft inside move in the last turn. The 500 concludes Saturday.
“I’d rather skate them all at once,” said Gabel, who has been battling a stomach flu that has caused him to shed about 4 pounds from his ideal racing weight of 164. “Now we have to start all over again, The round of 16 is the hardest.”
Earlier this week, Gabel, 33, became the first U.S. male short-tracker ever to advance beyond the quarterfinal round of an individual event, when he finished fourth in the 1,000-meter pack race finals.
