Ireen Wüst needed a small miracle to add a fourteenth medal to her Olympic palmares. That miracle did not come on Thursday. In Beijing she managed to set the sixth fastest time in the 1000 meters. Not the goodbye she dreamed of, but it doesn’t detract from her fantastic Olympic career.
Wüst’s successful Olympic series starts in 2006 in Turin. As a nineteen-year-old debutante, she immediately wins gold in the 3000 meters. A few days later, bronze also follows in the 1500 meters. At that distance she takes gold four years later.
In 2014, Wüst takes no less than five medals of honor in Sochi. Gold was in the 3000 meters and the team pursuit. Wüst took silver in the 1000, 1500 and 5000 meters. In 2018 she won gold in the 1500 meters, to also take silver in the 3000 meters and team pursuit. And she managed to add gold in the 1500 meters and bronze in the team pursuit in Beijing.
Realize
She has also never finished outside the top ten in twenty Olympic competitions. Now it’s done, right? “Yes. After sixteen years it has been really nice. In four years I will go to the Olympic Games to encourage everyone,” said the successful skater shortly after her last meters on Olympic ice at the NOS.
“I don’t fully realize that this was my last Olympic race,” she says honestly after the 1000 meters. “But I think it is good that that realization is not there. If you realize that very much, then you are no longer in the race. Of course I just wanted to drive a very good thousand meters. time.”
Ultimately, Wüst will look back on her Olympic career with great satisfaction. That was not the case on Thursday, because looking at the podium and the times, she saw that bronze had certainly been an option. “Miho Takagi had a fantastic ride, she is the deserved Olympic champion. Jutta drove a good time, she should be proud. But let me put it this way. I really like Brittany Bowe, we are friends. But the time of 1.14 .6… if I had put down a good 1000 meters, it might have been there.”
“I would like to do the ride over. At the start I fell forward. I wanted too much. Then a kind of old Wüst comes, who runs after the facts. It was more fighting than skating. And then you become sixth. “
Olympic dream
As a sixteen-year-old talent, she already said in conversation with Omroep Brabant that she dreamed of the Olympic Games. She herself started skating through the 1997 Elfstedentocht, in which her father participated. “That was very nice, there at the start. Then I bought my first skates.”
After that it got tough. Her ambitions were soon clear. “I try to achieve the highest possible level, hope to be able to compete with the top of the world. The Olympic Games, that is my dream.”
It became more than just competing in the Olympics. She became the ice queen with a huge amount of medals.
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