Ireen Wüst is working on her Olympic final chord. She is 35 years old and thinks it has been nice after this winter. But there is no question of quietly phasing out. If she appears anywhere at the start, it is to win. And that certainly applies to the fifth Olympic Games in her long career.
At the Games, her performance is unsurpassed. Wüst broke through as a 19-year-old talent, then with a clearly audible Brabant accent, in 2006 with gold in the 3 kilometers from Turin. Then followed in Vancouver in 2010, the Olympic title in the 1,500 meters, the titles in the 3 kilometers and the team pursuit in Sochi in 2014 and four years ago she was the best again in Pyeongchang, in the 1,500 meters. In addition to five golds, she also won five silver and one bronze medal. With eleven medals, she is by far the most successful Dutch Olympian.
There could be more, she thinks. In Beijing she has three chances: in the 1,000 and 1,500 meters, and the team pursuit. Despite her age, there is still no wear on her body. She is riding stable this winter and she is looking forward to her Olympic finish. She could pass legendary Soviet skater Lidija Skoblikova in the all-time ranking with one more gold medal. The Russian won a total of six golds at the 1960 and 1964 Games.
She is not on ‘a farewell tour’, says Wüst. And yet the approaching parting is always present. She draws energy from it. She compares it with interval training on a bicycle. ‘Suppose you have to do 12 blocks, then around the eighth or ninth you think: I can’t do anymore. With the latter you often have a revival because you know it is the last. I now have the feeling that I am working on that last repetition, in which I manage to find some extras.’
Crooked of the pain
Four years ago, in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Games, Wüst looked much less confident. She could be grumpy to the outside world and sometimes it seemed as if she was already on her way to the exit. Especially when at the start of the season Antoinette de Jong and Jorien ter Mors divided all titles among themselves, two for De Jong (3 and 5 kilometers) and three for Ter Mors (500, 1,000 and 1,500 meters). Wüst had to make do with two second and a third place.
It wasn’t a good time, she says now. The run-up to the 2018 Games was tense. She had founded her own team in 2015: Team4Gold. That name expressed her ambition. She wanted to win her fourth Olympic gold medal. In the last few months, the burden of expectations weighed heavily, as founder and leader of the team. “I really felt that pressure.”
To make matters worse, her preparation was laced with injuries. That started in the previous winter, just before the 2017 World Allround Championships in Hamar. During a training camp in Inzell she developed terrible pain in her abdomen. She broke off the training internship in a hurry and returned to the Netherlands.
After days full of tests and investigations, doctor Peter Vergouwen found that a pinched abdominal nerve was the cause of the misery. Acnes, the condition is called a abdominal wall pain syndrome. The remedy would be an injection of painkiller, but that would not allow Wüst to participate in the World Cup. And that’s exactly what she wanted.
‘So then I drove the World Cup with paracetamol, with the maximum amount. That had worn off by the evening and then I lay curled up in bed with pain. I couldn’t stretch anymore.’ In that dire situation, the morning couldn’t come soon enough. ‘Then I could take the next dose of paracetamol again.’ Despite everything, she became world champion.
Immediately after the World Cup, that injection went into the Netherlands. After a period of rest, everything seemed normal again. But in the autumn, just before the Olympic winter, things went wrong again. That pinched nerve again. ‘Here we go again. It was terrible and the pain radiated to my leg.’ The injection and rest, the same recipe as a few months earlier, did not offer sufficient relief. “I still felt it after that. It just didn’t end. I was stressed about whether it would be okay at all.’
In the meantime she continued to train, but she started to move around the pain unnoticed. She got all kinds of other injuries from it, especially to her left leg. “The whole chain got disrupted.” Just before the Olympic qualifying tournament, she also sprained her left ankle twice. ‘That was probably because things had already been disrupted, I missed the control’, she says. ‘When it happened I completely thought: now it won’t be okay anymore.’
She couldn’t do anything with her left leg, especially not on the ice. Only if the ankle was taped in tightly could she handle it sufficiently. She qualified as fastest for Pyeongchang. Once in South Korea, she won her fourth and fifth Olympic title in the 1,500 meters and team pursuit. Her ankle was still bandaged. No one noticed. “You’ve been sleeping,” she says with a laugh.
She does not experience that stress from then. She has no injuries, feels fit and free from too many expectations. She is no longer the leader of her own team, but a normal member of the group that trains at Team Reggeborgh under Gerard van Velde. She has sought and found a new impulse between sprinters such as Kjeld Nuis and Hein Otterspeer. Although that did not materialize last year in the most important competition of the season, the World Championship distances.
Sterile long track bubble
The corona bubble that was set up in Heerenveen, with two World Cup competitions, European Championship all-round and World Championship distances, did not suit her. ‘I am a competition animal, but with an audience. And in itself I can very well isolate myself in such a bubble, I do that with the Games too. But precisely because it was now around the corner from my house, I found it difficult. More difficult than when you’re in a different time zone.’
The races in Thialf had even less atmosphere than a normal training race, she thought. There was nothing to it. At the World Cup, that feeling was reinforced because the frost had chased everyone onto the natural ice. ‘I got all kinds of pictures and videos of skating outside.’ She also received messages from the group of friends that Paulien van Deutekom had been part of, her former teammate and best friend who passed away at the beginning of 2019. ‘What a pity that you and Paulien are not with us, they wrote.
Wüst had had it all in the sterile long track bubble. ‘Because of what I’ve been through in my life, also with Paulien, I have realized that I mainly want to do things that make me happy. You literally don’t know when it’s done. I thought: if I had the choice now, I would be much happier making memories with my friends on natural ice than with my umpteenth World Cup. For a top athlete, that thought is killing. But he was there. I would rather have stood with a sun on natural ice. I can be a rock-hard top athlete at almost all times and sometimes I’m just human too.’
She stayed in Thialf. And while the thaw outside came much earlier than she had hoped, she was stuck in fifth place in the 1,500 meters. NOS reporter Bert Maalderink asked her after that ride whether it was not time to put away the skates. ‘I didn’t really think it was necessary. That’s the most annoying thing to deal with.’ She was often asked when she would stop, even well before she was over 30. “It also happened when I was 23 and got overtrained,” she says. ‘Now Bert has his answer: in March.’