MILAN — Say "speed skating" out loud. There, you just covered the difference between success and failure in the Olympics. Four years of training, four years of work, four years of hopes and dreams … and you might fall short by a third of a second.
Kristen Santos-Griswold has spent the last four years training for Monday morning. One of the world's best short-track speed skaters, Santos-Griswold wasleading the 1000m race in Beijing when she was taken out on the final lap. She would go on to finish fourth, the most agonizing of all places in the Olympics.
"The hardest part about this sport," Santos-Griswold said recently, "is that kind of concept of, you can be the best, you can be the fastest, and things just don't work out for you."
She spent months after that 2022 heartbreak trying to figure out whether she wanted to commit another four years to training, knowing every minute of every day that it could all end in the literal blink of an eye.
"I had to really sit there and think, if in four years the same thing happens again, would that be worth it?" she said recently. "Obviously, I'm here. So I did decide that it would be."
Monday morning, Santos-Griswold put that mindset to the test as she stood on the starting line for the 1000m, this time in the quarterfinals. She needed to finish first or second, or notch one of the fastest third-place times in the quarterfinals, to advance to the semis.
The race began cleanly, a sharp contrast fromher four-start 500m race a few days ago. And very quickly, Santos-Griswold climbed into first place … which was exactly where shedidn'twant to be. Within a few laps, her pursuers caught her, and she couldn't make up the ground.
"I just expected it to start a bit faster, and that I was going to sit in second or something," she said a few minutes after the finish. "Then when it didn't, it's like,Alright, I've got to make a move and kind of pick it up a bit."
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She couldn't, finishing in third place by 0.34 seconds. Worse, her time of 1:29.102 wasn't fast enough to qualify her as a third-place finisher. And thus, her hopes for 1000m redemption ended right there in the quarterfinals.
This is the cruelty of short-track speed skating. Other Olympic sports have margins of victory measured in the tenths, hundredths, even thousandths of a second. But none of the athletes in those sports — skiing, biathlon, luge, and so on — have their competition literally entangled with them the way short-track speed skating does.
Sure, there are rules. You can't impede a skater while they're attempting a pass, you can't "brake-check" a fellow skater, you can't throw your blades around. But beyond that, collisions can and do happen. And when you're whipping around a sheet of ice at 30 miles an hour on millimeter-thick blades, well … there's a reason why short tracks have massive pads encircling the rink. It's a safe bet someone's going to fly into them at high speed.
With all that tension and pressure, it's a wonder short-track skaters aren't puddles of anxiety. Even so, Santos-Griswold has been open about her nerves before races, and she spoke of that on Monday following the end of her 1000m event.
"I get very nervous and anxious before races, but I just try to take it one step at a time," she said. "I try to go into it knowing that I'm as prepared as possible, but without the thought of, 'I've sacrificed so much,' and more like, 'I'm here because I want to be here.'"
Santos-Griswold has one individual race, the 1500m, remaining in her Milan Olympics … and, probably, her Olympic career as a whole. One more chance to cap off her comeback with a medal, even if she's already validated it to herself.
"I think I'll have to talk to my coaches and figure out maybe a different plan, and how I'm going to capitalize on the race at the end more," she said. "You can never really predict what anyone's going to do, so it's just what it is."
Maybe she'll be more at ease with the randomness of this sport and the near-misses of her Olympics in the coming days and years. But in the moment, she sure sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
