Canada's Clara Hughes skates the oval to win the gold medal in the women's 5,000-metre speedskating competition at the Turin 2006 Winter Olympic Games.
CP photo: Paul Chiasson
Speedskater Clara Hughes hoping sprints will help her go faster
Speedskater Clara Hughes was thinking outside the box after winning her Olympic gold medal in the 5,000 metres.
She was looking for something that would keep her fresh and help her go even faster heading into the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.
She found it in the sprints.
Hughes, a long-distance specialist, plans to race the 500 and 1,000 metres at the sprint World Cups in Harbin, China, and Nagano, Japan, in December.
So she will not race at the World Cup opener this weekend in Heerenveen, Netherlands, where the race menu features long and middle distances and sprints.
The 34-year-old from Winnipeg does not intend to become a sprinter and will return to the 3,000 and 5,000 metres on the World Cup circuit later this season.
But she and coach Xiuli Wang feel her early-season change-up has several benefits.
Delaying travelling and racing will help her regain her energy after a gruelling Olympic year and all the demands that followed her gold-medal performance.
More importantly, Hughes says the sprints will force her to have better technique at higher speeds.
“The faster you go, it’s so hard to keep the good technique,” Hughes explained Wednesday from Toronto. “For me, whenever I try to go fast, my technique usually falls apart.
“This year, I’m really working on being able to skate well at faster speeds because that will just enable me to skate faster in my long distances. The best way to improve on that is to race.”
Hughes was in Toronto at an event for her sponsor, Bell, and will stop in Winnipeg for a public speaking engagement Thursday before she’s back training at the Olympic Oval in Calgary on Friday morning.
Both she and Canadian teammate Cindy Klassen, winner of five Olympic medals, have delayed the start of their competitive seasons this winter to allow for more recovery from the Turin Olympics in February.
They’ve also looked for different ways to maintain passion for their sport and avoid burnout.
For Klassen, it was moving to Canmore, Alta., to train with the Canadian cross-country ski team.
For Hughes, it’s the prospect of stepping to the start line and being forced to hit her top speed within seconds, not minutes.
“I’m just trying to work on my weaknesses,” she explained. “If you look at the first 200 metres of my 5,000, I lose two seconds to some of my competitors.
“That’s a lot of time to have to make up.”
One of her short-term goals is to challenge the world record in the women’s 5,000, set at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City by Germany’s Claudia Pechstein.
Pechstein’s six minutes 46.91 seconds is posted on the third-turn wall at the Oval along with rest of the world records.
“I look at that world record on the wall every single day that I skate in Calgary and it’s beatable,” Hughes said. “It’s absolutely beatable and I’d like to be the one that did it.”
Hughes will have to cut more than six seconds off her personal best time to set a new world mark.
Salt Lake City and Calgary have the fastest ice in the world, and as luck would have it, the World Cup final is March 2-4 in Calgary and the world single-distance championships are March 8-10 in Salt Lake City.
The world record has given her something to focus on when the 2010 Games still seem far away
“When you don’t have a solid goal, you can become very, very lost,” Hughes said “Four years is a long time. People are already asking me if I’m ready for Vancouver. I just finished Torino.”
© The Canadian Press 2006
