Skating coach Gerard van Velde was sitting on the couch on Sunday evening at home in Heerdeoop de Veluwe, when his pupil Femke Kok eight thousand kilometers away started the 500 meters that would culminate in a new world record. “I had a small screen on my lap,” Van Velde says by telephone the next morning. “So when I saw Femke’s end time, I said to my wife and son: am I seeing it correctly? Does it say 36-zero-nine? I was in disbelief.”
Femke Kok (25) delivered a historic performance on Sunday evening at the first World Cup competitions of the season: she was the first Dutch skater ever to break the world record for the 500 meters. It was the oldest standing record in long track speed skating, set twelve years ago to the day by South Korea’s Lee Sang-hwa, also in Salt Lake City. Kok improved that time by almost three tenths, from 36.36 to 36.09 – spectacular for the shortest sprint distance. “An incomprehensible time,” Van de Velde calls it.
Kok herself mentioned her record afterwards to the NOS “a dream that came true.” She had watched Lee’s ride hundreds of times with amazement: how can she skate so fast? Kok also watched the 2013 race again on Sunday. She had, she told NOS, “got up in the morning with the idea: would it be possible?”
Kok is the first Dutch skater since Annamarie Thomas in 1998 to set a world record. She is now, if that was not already the case after her three consecutive world titles in the 500 meters, as the top favorite for gold in the 500 meters at the Winter Olympics in Milan.
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Smallest detail
Former Olympic champion Van Velde, who as head coach of Team Reggeborgh has been Kok’s personal trainer for five years, was not in Salt Lake City because he and his two assistant coaches take turns on long trips – they all have young children. Van Velde flew to Calgary on Monday for the next World Cup match next weekend.
Van Velde does not often give interviews, but he would like to talk about this achievement on the way to Schiphol. He has rewatched Kok’s golden ride “at least twenty times” since Sunday evening. “At two o’clock in the morning I was still not asleep.” The other sprint prodigy from his team, Jenning de Boo, also had a very successful evening in Salt Lake City: he won the men’s 500 meters in 33.63, coming within 0.02 seconds of the world record.
Van Velde can now recall Kok’s ride in his mind’s eye down to the smallest detail, as it turns out over the telephone. “She was off to a good start in the first few metres. Then you see her open in 10.19 and you think: Wow, very good. First corner: low, good line. She stays in the second straight, all the shots are on point. She comes out of the last outside corner just a little deeper, but she kicks out well low. In the last hundred meters she sprints, she pulls to 57.2 kilometers per hour – that’s where you see how strong she is.” In summary: “A ride that approaches perfection.”
Somehow he knew that Kok was capable of this, says Van Velde. “We discussed in advance whether she could set a world record.” Yet Lee’s old record always seemed “untouchable.” That is why Van Velde was particularly surprised by the “incredibly big bite” that Kok took from that time: 0.27 seconds. “You win a 500 meter by hundredths, we all know that. We have had the entire top 8 of a race within a tenth of a second of each other. Now you are almost three-tenths of a second below the old world record.”
Olympic chances
The Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City, located at an altitude of 1,425 meters, is considered the fastest ice rink in the world. Van Velde himself also experienced the best moment of his skating career there: in 2002 he became Olympic champion in the 1,000 meters. The conditions were excellent this weekend: fast ice, good air pressure. The racing was extremely fast: on Friday the world record in the men’s 5,000 meters was broken, and on Sunday the world record in the men’s team pursuit was also broken. Over the entire weekend, 94 national records and 278 personal records were set.
However, almost perfect conditions, says Van Velde, are still no guarantee for success. The point, he says in his sometimes inimitable idiom, is that you are “not consciously the best”. What does he mean by that? “If you think in advance: I’m going to set a world record, then you often do things differently, then it becomes a bit frenetic: it has to be done and it will be done. Exceptional achievements, such as a world record or gold Olympic medals, you cannot just call them up. They happen to you.”
That is precisely why Van Velde is still very cautious when it comes to Kok’s Olympic chances. Among skating experts, it is considered the absolute favorite for gold in Milan in the 500 meters, and in this form perhaps also in the 1,000 and even 1,500 meters, on which Kok surprisingly tightened the track record in Thialf to 1.52.69 earlier this year.
You won’t hear Van Velde say that. “The question is always: where will you be in two weeks, six weeks, two months?” Between now and early February, when the Winter Games start, “there are still plenty of bumps to overcome,” he says. “You have to be happy with today and just do your best again tomorrow.”
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