One of the delights of the Winter Olympics, which begin in Turin on Friday, is rediscovering the thrill of long-forgotten sports. The liaison may only be for a night, two if you’re lucky, and it certainly helps the memory-jogging if a whiff of patriotism pervades the icy air.
“Nascar on ice”, the Americans call short-track speed skating, a sport which hurtled into the nation’s consciousness with Wilf O’Reilly and Nicky Gooch during the sport’s Olympic infancy in the early 1990s. Gooch won bronze in the 500m at the Lillehammer games in 1994 after being controversially deprived of silver in the 1,000m and remains a significant figure in the sport as assistant coach, mechanic and mentor to the national squad.
In the team room at the Nottingham Ice Arena, Gooch can be found at a workbench, adjusting the angle on the 17Åin blades of Britain’s new young lion. Jon Eley is, by common consent, the best short-track speed skater to emerge from this country for the past decade, the natural inheritor of a tradition still being nurtured in one of the more rundown areas of the city.
For all the brilliance of Torvill and Dean, Curry and Cousins, the British still regard the ice as a place for gentle pleasure, not serious physical exertion. Where an hour before the British speed skating squad had completed a gruelling training session in preparation for two major championships — the Europeans and the Olympics — the public now shuffle sedately to the beat of 1970s disco music. The contrast could not be more acute.
Yet, compared to a decade ago, facilities are palatial, the funding is strong and the support network for the skaters unprecedented.
Eley, who, at 6ft 1in, is a giant in a sport dominated by compact Koreans, emerges from a morning session with the team’s psychologist. “Controlling the controllables” has been the theme, highly relevant to the 21-year-old, whose laid-back approach to life off the ice contrasts with his reputation for hot-headedness in the rink. Last week, before heading to their holding camp in Bormio, the squad listened to a talk on the Olympic experiences of Leon Taylor, the synchronised diver who won silver — Britain’s first medal — in Athens. This is an important part of the education for Eley, who will be experiencing the hype and glitz of the Olympics for the first time.
“He’ll be sitting in the athletes’ canteen and Wayne Gretzky will sit down at the table next to him,” says Gooch. “It can blow your mind.”
Eley’s not least. As a boy growing up in Birmingham, he wanted to be Gretzky or the West Midlands version of the great Canadian ice hockey player. His first love was ice hockey, his first team the Solihull Barons. “I started skating at about 18 months,” he says, “with blades strapped to my shoes. I only started speed skating when I was about 13 and even then I took time to get the hang of it; I just wanted to have a stick and a puck.” He was also a decent enough wicketkeeper-batsman for Marston Green to win a place in Warwickshire’s junior side.
Within eight months of donning speed skates, Eley had won the under-14 national championships and put himself on a fast track to the development squad. By the age of 16, he had moved from home to live in Nottingham and train full-time. His best mate, Paul Stanley, another West Midlands boy, came too, which both softened the blow of leaving home and enhanced the Brummie twang within the new young squad.
Eley further advertised his talent by winning a bronze overall at the junior world championships in Beijing in 2004 and then as a 19-year-old missing out on a bronze by a finger snap at the senior European championships. It was his first taste of real disappointment, but by no means his last. As Stephen Bradbury found to his delight in Salt Lake City, the tortoise can beat the hare in this most explosive of sports. The Australian went into the last bend of the 1,000m final languishing in fourth and last place and came out a split-second later with the gold medal, all three of the leaders having crashed out.
“A lot of things can happen in a race,” says Gooch. “Falls, people pushing you over, blocking, all sorts of things. Jon’s pretty aggressive when he’s skating well, he’s quite wired, but sometimes he pushes things too hard. But his great advantage is that he’s young in a young person’s sport and fearless in a sport that knows no fear. I started to worry about getting hurt at the end. That was when I knew it was time to pack up.”
At the recent European championships in Poland, Eley was disqualified from the semi-finals of the 500m, a race he won, and the quarter-finals of the 1,000m, both borderline calls, he reckons.
“The racing was pretty tough and because it’s the Europeans, people know you and target you,” he says. “In the 500m, the guy went a bit wide and I went up the inside, so he jumped back on me. It was partly my fault because he has a reputation for doing that and I should have thought about it, partly his fault for setting out to block me. But you can’t argue with the ref nowadays. In the 1,000m I went round the outside of the French bloke and elbowed him in the face on the way past. It was accidental. If he’d have been bigger I would have hit him in the chest. Anyway, he went straight down and that was that.
“But I was pleased with the way I skated. I was drawn in lane 4 (on the outside), which is a tough lane, and won both my starts from there, and I was right on the pace the whole time.
“We’d already spoken with the psychologist about how to cope with the Europeans, about what we would do if we did well or not. It’s Turin that counts. We’ve been preparing for that all along. When the North Americans and Korean skaters come in, they’re not so bothered about what you’re doing, so you can skate your own race more.”
According to Gooch, Eley could yet surprise a few of the more established stars of the sport. “A lot of the Canadians, I know, don’t like racing against Jon,” he says. “They know he’s dangerous. The problem is his inconsistency. He can be very good and very bad. You mustn’t panic if things don’t work out. That was maybe my problem when I won silver. I wanted the gold and made a mistake, but if you see a gap, you ’ve got to go for it.”
Eley will compete in all three disciplines — 500m, 1,000m and 1500m — and, warns Gooch, must pace himself through a long competition.
“I’ve been dreaming about this since watching the last Games and I really think I could come up with something,” says Eley. “I’m preparing to win a medal because, who knows, the chance might not come around again.”
Young and fearless? That sounds like a decent combination to be taking into the demolition derby of the Winter Games.
