It was not pleasant in Thialf last Monday evening. With less than a week to go until the Olympic Qualifying Tournament (OKT), a final training match was held. Test your legs one more time, see where you stand, before all Dutch skating tickets for the Winter Games in Beijing will be distributed in five days.
National coach Jan Coopmans was sitting in the stands. He saw “falls, exchange problems”. Koen Verweij and Wesly Dijs met each other at the crossing at the 1,000 meters and did not give each other an inch. Result: disqualification for Verweij, a bad time for Dijs and two frustrated heads. Dress rehearsal failed. A few rides before that, Ireen Wüst could only just avoid Chris Huizinga when he fell at high speed in their direct duel. Her ride was over immediately. Coopmans: „Everyone was driving at the limit. They did not allow each other the light in the eyes.”
Soon at the Games they will all skate for the Netherlands, but just before the OKT, the tension among the skaters is great and it is everyone for himself. The tournament is the least popular tournament of the year for the Dutch, of the entire Olympic cycle, they say without exception.
It has been eating them for months, some have not been able to get a bite down their throats in recent weeks. They sleep badly, are irritable, suffer from diarrhoea. They can’t think of anything else. The fear of failure is becoming more unavoidable by the day, even for the greatest champions. Past performance no longer protects them. Everyone starts at zero on Sunday.
Doubt sometimes robs them of all pleasure. Have they trained hard enough or would that extra tempo block still be good? What if they make a mistake, or go wrong twice, and see four years of doing a lot and even more disappear in one fateful second? They can’t help but do what they’ve always done; collapse at ready, waiting motionless for the starter and giving everything at the shot.
The Dutch top skaters have been working towards this tournament for years. Until that of Turin (2006) they were more or less assured of a starting license if they finished in the best three at their distance, that has not been the case since Vancouver (2010). Skating association KNSB wants to mine as much gold as possible. And that means very sharp selection has to be made.
Big surprises
The combination of the snapshot and the high pressure causes some big surprises almost every four years. Some skaters are good all year round, but not at the most important time. Enough skaters who can talk about it. Like Kjeld Nuis, after he missed all tickets eight years ago. He had to wait four years longer for his Olympic debut.
Or Dai Dai N’tab, the big favorite for the 500 meters four years ago. Two false starts later, his Olympic dream was over. For the entire season that followed the Pyeongchang Games, he was “tangled with himself”, he said in October during a training camp in Inzell, Germany. Starting became an issue as he had the feeling that everyone in the stadium was watching him as he made his way to the starting line. “All in all, I lost two years to it.”
There are also skaters who peak at just the right time. Four years ago, Esmee Visser and Carlijn Achtereekte took advantage of their open-mindedness and unexpectedly qualified for the Games. A few months later they also became Olympic champions in the 5,000 and 3,000 meters respectively. . She is “not really” looking forward to it. “Just the letters OKT give me the creeps.” With the 31-year-old skater it is important that this may be her last chance at the Games. That gives the tournament in Thialf extra meaning. And she can still remember the thrill of four years ago. “That was not fun.”
Highest chance of gold
What makes the pressure this OKT extra great is that due to new rules from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on behalf of the Netherlands, only nine men and nine women are allowed to go to China, one skater per gender less than four years ago in South Korea. Although the Netherlands may come out with three skaters on all distances – there are two starting places in the 5,000 meters for the women and the 10,000 meters for the men – these cannot be filled by fourteen different skaters. “That means that a third place in the OKT offers no certainty whether you can actually go to the Games,” says national coach Coopmans.
In order to arrive at a good selection, the KNSB has drawn up a ranking of the distances at which the Netherlands has the best chance of winning a gold medal. Partly on the basis of this so-called matrix, but not exclusively based on it, the KNSB decides who is allowed to go to the Games. “It is for the skaters as if they are participating in a tournament where they can only lose,” says Coopmans. “That gives a very different mental field of tension than the Games, where you can win a medal.”
Jorien ter Mors, reigning Olympic champion over 1,000 meters, already talked about this during her training camp in Inzell. “When you’re at the Games, you’ve already had the worst,” she said. “I’d rather drive there than on the OKT.”
So much mental pressure is hard to imagine for non-elite athletes. Artists come closest to it. Some of them invariably throw up before going on stage. “Compare it with a job interview or a presentation at work,” says Nico van Yperen, professor of sports psychology at the University of Groningen. “The only difference is that there is usually no time pressure and no full stands are watching you. In everyday life we can usually still correct. That is not possible on the OKT. It must then happen and there is a lot at stake. Life looks quite different with an Olympic gold or silver medal.”
Van Yperen works with athletes to normalize nerves. How to tackle that is a personal quest for everyone, he says. „What do the signals you receive when you experience tension mean, how do you interpret them? How you feel has to do with how you think. Thought patterns can make things worse or less bad. Insight into this can yield profit.”
Breathing Exercises
It is often thought that athletes who are successful will perform better thanks to pressure. But that is not the case, says Van Yperen. “Everyone performs less well under intense pressure, according to research. The winners are the ones who make the fewest mistakes.”
It took former skater Mark Tuitert two Olympic cycles and thirty years of life experience to discover what was the best mental preparation for him for the OKT. “The trick is to stop your train of thoughts,” he says. “You have to envision what you can control and what you can’t. If you start thinking about what could happen if things go wrong, you put yourself under a lot of stress.”
Photo Vincent Jannink/ANP
In the period before the OKT where he had to qualify for the Vancouver Games (2010), Tuitert started breathing exercises, ten to fifteen minutes a day, so that he could fall asleep peacefully. He visualized his races, thought through scenarios from the edge of his bed, including the negative ones. Thus he trained his emotional response. He also had a conversation with an F16 pilot. “Soldiers experience life-threatening situations and that’s how OKT feels a bit. It may sound exaggerated, but it isn’t. For skaters it comes down to who they are next week. Their identity is at stake, because it could all be over in an instant. No Olympics, no contract, end of career.”
Tuitert sought distraction in the last days before the OKT. He went to mow the lawn at home because the walls were coming at him in the hotel. He wrote all the banal things in life – what do I want after the Games, do we continue to live in the same house? – on an A4 sheet and gave it to his wife. That’s how he parked his other worries. Once in Thialf, he tried to enjoy what he saw. Then from a box in the middle ground, with music in his ears, he would laugh and watch other skaters drive themselves crazy. He calmed down.
His Olympic gold in the 1,500 meters that season was also the result of years of searching for the right mindset. “It’s about getting to know yourself,” says Tuitert. “That you learn to direct yourself. If you can do that, you not only have tools that you can use during an OCT, but also for the rest of your life.”
Mental help
Many skaters look for help in the form of mental guidance in their preparation for the OKT. That is no longer a big taboo in most sports. Many athletes talk about it openly, because they have realized that top performances are not possible without a clear mind. “I’ve been doing it for quite a few years,” says Achtereekte about the guidance she receives. “Because you have to be strong both physically and mentally. Mentally, top sport is sometimes really not easy. I see it as a strength that I dare to let myself be helped. A few years ago the subject was really a no-go, now it is becoming more and more open for discussion.”
At Team IKO, which includes Olympic champions Jorien ter Mors and Esmee Visser, they have decided to tackle mental coaching at team level. Since this spring, the Groningen skating team has been working together with Psyned, a national organization within mental health care. In exchange for their name on the clothing of the coaching staff, the skaters receive mental help from Psyned’s sports psychologists if they need it.
“We believe that you can also train your mental health,” says coach Erik Bouwman. “That way you prevent that at the supreme moment you get confused.” Ultimately, according to the skating coach, it is about performing at the right time. And to do that, you must perform your duties, as always. Bouwman: “But yes, that sounds very simple. In practice it is not.”
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