Zen and the Art of Speedskating

No matter how wonderful speedskating feels, or how much participants love it, in the eyes of mass media we are a fringe sport barely worthy of more than a hiccup of notice once every 4 years.

However the internet makes some wonderful things possible, like VIDEO of racing, The always excellent website ohnozone.net has some short track, and there is a new site in the Netherlands right now putting up video of some recent dutch long track races.

here is the link:

http://www.knsb.nl/live-2007/nk/afstanden/content/video/video.asp

I hope they will put the world cup races on there, so fans from all over the world can see it.

This is a windows media only site. However even for Mac zealots like myself, one can get the flip-for-mac .wmv player, so you can use Quicktime to look at windows files.

Lest you think I am blindly advocating the “Cult-O-Mac”, Quicktime is actually incredibly useful for watching speedskating technique, as it allows moving through video frame-by-frame with the arrow keys.

Jan Bos is a beautiful skater, astonishing technique, and in slow-mo, frame by frame, he lives up to his nickname “Catman”.

In this image 400m into a 1000m race, he uses his smooth technique to get a big draft from big dude Gerhard Van Velde. He might not be a dedicated blogger, but this guy can really skate.

Filed under: from home