The wrong Dutchman won the men’s 5,000-meter speedskating race Saturday at the Winter Olympics, but that wasn’t half as surprising as who finished second.
That was Derek Parra up on the podium, a silver medal dangling from his neck. Derek Parra, the Mexican-American kid from San Bernardino, Calif., by way of Orlando. Well, he’s not a kid anymore, he’s a month shy of 32, and he turned to ice skating only because he realized seven years ago that inline skating would not be an Olympic sport in his competitive lifetime. And, darn, he wanted a medal.
Now he has one. A Hispanic from Sun Belt states has a Winter Games medal, same as Jochem Uytdehaage, the winning skater from the Netherlands, and Jens Boden of Germany, who took the bronze. In an afternoon of upsets, those guys were as surprised with their finishes as Parra was with his.
Surprise upon surprise, it took a world-record time of 6 minutes 14.66 seconds by Uytdehaage to knock Parra, who had himself skated a world-record time, out of the gold medal. Although Parra had seriously planned to win a medal, this was not the race he had it figured for.
“We decided my best race would be the 1,500, so my wife, Tiffany, stayed home with our daughter, Mia,” Parra said of his Feb. 19 race . “When I called her, she said she’d been watching on television and was jumping up and down on the couch. She said she jumped a little higher every lap. That must have been funny.”
Went right along with the rest of the race, a funny one if every there was one.
Dutch skaters have dominated the distance races since before the last Winter Games at Nagano, where Hollanders Gianni Romme and Rintje Ritsma finished 1-2 in the 5,000, ahead of expatriate Dutchman Bart Veldcamp, skating for Belgium. There were plenty predicting a Dutch sweep in Utah.
Then Romme, the defending Olympic champion and last season’s World Cup champion, failed to qualify for the 5,000, finishing fifth in the Dutch trials. That left Carl Verheijen and Bob de Jong, veteran skaters and winners, not to mention Uytdehaage, whom almost no one did.
Everyone was sure that on the fast ice of the Utah Olympic Oval, the Dutch would clean up, with records falling right and left.
Then the racing began, and everything changed. Nobody went very fast. KC Boutiette, skating in the second pair, surprisingly set a U.S. record but it was well off the Olympic and world records. When Boden, skating against Veldcamp in the fifth pair, came out of nowhere with a 6:21.73, that went up as an Olympic record but about three seconds shy of the world mark.
For nearly an hour, however, Boden’s name stayed atop the leader board. That was until Parra, skating on newly resurfaced ice in the first pair of the supposedly fast group, knocked him off with the first really fast time of the day, 6:17.98. Had he imagined such a time?
“Not by me,” he quipped. “By four or five other skaters. And I’m sure when Jochem saw my time, he said, `I can beat that. I beat him all the time.’ I have to say, though, that was the best 5K of my life.”
And in posting his fast time, Parra blew by his skating partner, Canadian Dustin Molicki, a legitimate medal threat.
Then, the others stepped up, fired and missed. Verheijen skated a mediocre 6:24.71. Russian Vadim Sayutin and Norwegian Stian Bjorge fared poorly.
Finally, only two pairs stood between Parra and a gold medal. In one of them, however, was Uytdehaage, who quickly settled that matter. It was obvious at the halfway mark of his race that, unless he fell, he would beat Parra’s time. He didn’t fall.
Which brought up de Jong. He and pair partner Toshihiko Itokawa of Japan were in perfect position to upset the apple cart for both Uytdehaage and Parra. Didn’t happen. The Japanese skated poorly and de Jong was out of contention in his first couple of laps, leaving a tearful Uytdehaage clasping his hands and gazing skyward.
“I was a little bit emotional,” he said. “It overcomes you. … It’s amazing I’m up here. It’s amazing that it’s the three of us on the podium.”
No less amazing to Parra.
“Total surprise,” he said. “Like Jochem said, the three of us up here when there were so many good skaters in this race. “I was pretty inspired by KC, and then seeing the other times, I just got more confident, thinking, `I can do that.’ “
And so he did it, a Hispanic winning Winter silver.
“This is a great thing to help Hispanics reach for their goals,” he said. “I’m going back to my elementary school with my medal and telling the kids, `Reach high!’ “
