Even the national coach didn’t expect it. After the withdrawal of Jens van ‘t Wout, who first skipped the semi-final of the 1,000 meters as a precaution but then turned out to be unable to participate in the men’s relay, few gave the Netherlands a chance to end the weekend of the Short Track World Cup in Dordrecht with a gold medal.
But just after five on Sunday afternoon, the 2,800 spectators present stand on the benches and the men in orange slide through the ice rink with their hands in the air. Even without the best short tracker in the Netherlands, Melle van ‘t Wout, Friso Emons, Itzhak de Laat and Teun Boer keep China, Italy and Hungary at bay. Thanks to a number of great substitutions, the Netherlands takes the lead and the skaters manage to maintain that position in the last exciting rounds.
National coach Niels Kerstholt has a satisfied smile on his face afterwards. “Everyone has to show the good at the same time, and often there is a mistake or thing somewhere, that is the reality. But now they were all on, they positively surprised me. And that we make the difference with a few good substitutions… yes, that is indescribable.”
Three relays, three gold medals. That’s how Kerstholt likes it. He saw the last World Cup weekend of the season as the “dress rehearsal” for the Winter Games. And the objective is clear, Kerstholt said at the start of this Olympic season: “We want everyone to go home with an Olympic medal.”
In each of the relay events – the men’s, women’s and mixed relay – the national coach sees opportunities to finish on the podium in Italy. “That would be very special, it hardly happens,” said Kerstholt. “But as a team we would find that very cool.”
Repayment principle
The Dutch short trackers are used to the fact that the relays matter. Under former national coach Jeroen Otter, who himself became world champion in the event four times as a short tracker with the Netherlands in the 1980s, almost all training was carried out based on the relay principle: riders pushed each other as if they were changing for a relay before starting their individual laps.
It led to great successes: the women became Olympic champions in Beijing four years ago and won the world title under Otter in 2021, and the men became world champions in 2014, 2017 and 2021.
This trend has been continued under national coach Kerstholt, who took office after the 2022 Games, and there is still a lot of team training. The women won world titles in 2023 and 2024, and in 2023 there was also gold in the new part of the mixed relay, in which two men and two women compete together on the ice.
This season, the relay teams are on schedule for the Winter Games: the Olympic starting tickets were secured at the previous World Cup competition in Gdansk, Poland, and all three teams have already finished on the podium in the World Cup this season before Dordrecht.
Quality injection
In the women’s team, the biggest contender for Olympic success, three quarters of the team is fixed: Xandra and Michelle Velzeboer and Selma Poutsma normally appear at the start. The last position will be filled this season by Diede van Oorschot or Zoë Deltrap.
“We started a new team a year and a half ago,” says Xandra Velzeboer, referring to the departure of Yara van Kerkhof, who quit, and Suzanne Schulting, who switched to long track skating due to an injury. This meant that experience disappeared from the team, but the new generation has “picked up everything very quickly,” Velzeboer sees. “The fact that we have been training together for a year and a half now and often ride with the same team ensures that we are very stable.”
Xandra Velzeboer during the individual final 1,500 meters.
Photo Iris van den Broek / ANP
Last year there were immediate good results; the team won two World Cups. And earlier this season the Dutch women also came first and second. According to Van Oorschot, the team performs so well because it is so “close-knit”. “We dare to tell each other what is going well and what is not.”
On Saturday, the team wins its second World Cup competition in a row, and with it the ranking for this season. Leader Velzeboer believes that her team is one of the favorites to defend their Olympic title four years ago. “We were disappointed with bronze at the World Short Track Championships. That says enough.”
The team may be waiting for another injection of quality with the return of Schulting, three-time Olympic short track champion. Schulting is focusing on the 500 and 1,000 meters on the long track this season, but was unable to qualify for the World Cup competitions this fall.
If the same thing happens during the Olympic qualifying tournament (OKT), is the door open for her? Velzeboer keeps a low profile. “I can’t see into the future, so we’ll see.” National coach Kerstholt sighs. “I understand that this is an interesting scenario, but it is not my job to deal with it now.”
Launched
The part where the Dutch philosophy of always training together can potentially yield the most is the mixed relay. The discipline had its premiere four years ago in Beijing and even then the Netherlands was a contender for gold, until Schulting’s fall in the semi-finals put an end to this prematurely.
It is the short distance – 2,000 meters instead of 3,000 (women) or 5,000 meters) – and the substitutions from men to women and vice versa that make this event special. Michelle Velzeboer is launched when she gets a push from Jens van ‘t Wout, she says laughing. “That is always exciting. You get a speed that you cannot simply develop yourself. But we have completely fine-tuned it during the training sessions.”
Conversely, a man should not be too heavy, but the weight difference between Xandra Velzeboer and Teun Boer, who is next in line, is nevertheless large. “We have to be very careful about that,” said Velzeboer. “In terms of timing, that our speeds match. We train very hard for that, and you can see in the competition that we are very strong at it.”
It will result in a gold medal in Dordrecht on Sunday. The Netherlands is a class better than the rest, partly because Canada eliminated itself due to a crash. “This was coming,” Van ‘t Wout said to a cheering stadium after the race.
Improvise
A different story is the men’s team, which performs more inconsistently. No line-up has been set yet: in the three World Cup finals, Kerstholt fielded seven different skaters in three different line-ups. Last weekend in Gdansk, Melle van ‘t Wout and Bram Steenaart got a chance. “The Olympic tickets had already arrived, both boys are still relatively green on the relay, so this was the time to try it out,” says Kerstholt. It resulted in a disqualification after an unauthorized overtaking action by Steenaart.
Leader Jens van ‘t Wout approached the national coach this week to ask whether a fixed line-up could be ridden more often. “Melle, Daan Kos and I have been pre-selected for the Games, so I think we should ride more with them to get used to each other,” he explains. “We only have a maximum of three races left to practice against the Asian countries and Canada.”
The Dutch team celebrates its victory in the mixed relay.
Photo Iris van den Broek / ANP
Kerstholt had to laugh at those words prior to the matches in Dordrecht. “Everyone has an opinion and believes that there should be a permanent team in which he or she has a place. But I also have to decide who else to bring along in addition to the boys who have been pre-selected.”
The national coach will be right on Sunday. Due to Kos’ back injury and Jens van ‘t Wout’s late cancellation, he has to improvise, but it makes no difference to the result. Kerstholt jumps up and down euphorically when Boer crosses the finish line first with a skate-length lead; Jens van ‘t Wout shouts out. A large group hug follows at the boarding, in which the female short track speed skaters also participate.
When the orange men are called onto the ice to receive their gold medal, the stadium speaker starts saying ‘Champions, Champions, olé, olé, olé’. The audience sings, the skaters wave back rhythmically. Dress rehearsal successful.
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