World Sprint Championships disappointment for Brock Miron

Vendredi, janvier 26 @ 14:08:59 PST

Brock Miron - Copyright Meijco.nl The World Sprint Championships in Hamar were a great success for some Canadian speed skaters like Cindy Klassen, who placed third overall after skipping the entire first half of the season, and Denny Morrison, who won a bronze medal in the second 1000m. However, not all Canadians will look back equally pleased. Mike Ireland injured his ankle in his first 500m and withdrew, and Brock Miron had to deal with some problems of his own when malfunctioning equipment caused him to completely lose his balance in his first 500m. How does Miron look back on the World Sprints?

By Jolanda Abbes

What happened in your first 500m?

"There is a small aluminium plate with a post attached to it at the back of the maple blade. The white stopper that fits into the mechanism when the Clap is closed fits onto that post. The post simply snapped off at about the 75 meter mark of my opener, so that as soon as the Clap mechanism and blade come together there was nothing keeping the two from rotating perpendicular to the clap-opening motion. As soon as I leaned over to enter the turn the blade torqued out of the turn and I went down."

Erben Wennemars offered his back-up pair to you after your first 500m. Did you take him up on his offer or were you able to fix your own pair in time?

"Obviously it was very important to Erben to have a pair for that race as he was skating well enough to be in the running for the overall title and no one likes to skate alone. I guess he felt it important enough that he have a pair to race against, to offer me his back-up pair of blades. It was a nice gesture. As it turns out my coach Marcel, Marnix Wieberdink, and one of the Dutch skate technicians were able to put together something for me about 30 minutes before the race. It was a quick fix that luckily held for the whole competition, but now I have a new pair on that I'll be trying out this week and hopefully be ready to race on for the World Cup. The quick fix won't last much longer because of difficulties riveting the new aluminum plate onto the blade, so I'd rather not take the chance of having them break again."

Brock Miron - Copyright Meijco.nl

What do you think your overall chances had been if you had not encountered these problems in the 500m?

"It's very hard to say what might have been or not. I'd like to think that as I had two other races where I finished top 12 I'd have been around there. My last 1000m in my mind doesn't really count, as I was trying something completely different in my warm-up race prep for that race as an experiment, since it meant little whether I did well or not. My experiment obviously failed, as I was pretty much dead from the 50 meter mark on."

How do you look back on the World Sprint Championships? Are you satisfied (besides you first 500m, obviously)?

"It's quite hard to look past the first 500m as the event is cumulative. It's somewhat of a bummer for the weekend when you know that no matter how you skate the rest of the event, you're completely out of it. The rest of the races become more like training races really, where you go out and just simply work on execution and even new things. It's not that often when you feel really peaked and ready to go fast, and have races that mean virtually nothing, other than maybe proving to yourself that you can be competitive with the top guys. In all three of my other races there were numerous things that I could have done better, but some things that I was happy with, so I can only take away the experience and try to get better."

Photo 1: Brock Miron, Heerenveen, January 21, 2006
Photo 2: Brock Miron, Inzell, March 4, 2005
Credit: Meijco.nl