MILAN — Say “speed skating” out loud. There, you just covered the difference between Olympic success and failure. Four years of training, four years of work, four years of hopes and dreams…and you can be a third of a second behind.
Christian Santos Griswold has been training for Monday mornings for the past four years. Santos-Griswold, one of the world’s best short-track speed skaters, was leading the 1,000-meter race in Beijing before being eliminated on the final lap. She ended up finishing fourth, the most harrowing of all Olympic placings.
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“The hardest part of this sport,” Santos-Griswold said recently, “is the idea that you can be the best, you can be the fastest, but things just don’t work for you.”
After that heartbreak in 2022, she spent months wondering if she wanted to commit to another four years of training, knowing that every minute of every day could be over in the blink of an eye.
“I had to really sit there and think, if the same thing happens again in four years, is it worth it?” she said recently. “Obviously, I’m here. So I did decide.”
On Monday morning, Santos-Griswold stood at the starting line of the 1,000 meters, this time in the quarterfinals, and her mentality was put to the test. She needed to finish first or second, or be fastest third in the quarterfinals, to advance to the semifinals.
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The race started cleanly, in stark contrast to the 500m race in which she had started four times in previous days. Soon, Santos Griswold was at No. 1…and that’s exactly where she is No Want to be. After just a few laps, the pursuers caught up with her and she was unable to cover the ground.
“I just wish the race would start faster and I’d be sitting in second or something,” she said minutes after the race ended. “And then when it didn’t come up, it was like, Okay, I gotta take action and do something.“.
She failed to make it and finished third by 0.34 seconds. To make matters worse, her time of 1:29.102 was not enough to qualify her for third place. Just like that, her hopes of redemption in the 1000m ended in the quarterfinals.
Kristin Santos Griswold reacts after competing in the women’s 1,000m short track speed skating quarterfinals. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
(Jamie Squire via Getty Images)
This is the cruelty of short track speed skating. Victory margins in other Olympic sports are measured in tenths, hundredths or even thousandths of a second. But in no one of these sports—skiing, biathlon, luge, etc.—is an athlete as truly entangled with his or her game as short track speed skating.
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Of course, there are rules. You can’t hinder skaters when they’re trying to pass, you can’t “brake-check” other skaters, and you can’t throw your blade around. But beyond that, collisions can and do happen. When you’re slicing across the ice at 30 miles an hour with a millimeter-thick blade, well… that’s why short tracks have huge pads around the rink. You can be sure someone will fly towards them at high speed.
Faced with so much tension and pressure, it’s a wonder short track skaters don’t sink into anxiety. Even so, Santos-Griswold was open about her nerves before the race, which she talked about on Monday after the 1,000 meters.
“I would get really nervous and anxious before games, but I just tried to take it one step at a time,” she said. “I try to go into it knowing that I’m as prepared as I can be, but not thinking ‘I’ve sacrificed a lot,’ but more like ‘I’m here because I want to stay here.'”
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Santos Griswold has one more individual event left to compete in during her Milan Olympics, the 1500m…and probably her entire Olympic career. Even though she’s proven it to herself, she still has a chance to end her comeback with a medal.
“I guess I’m going to have to talk to my coach and come up with a different plan and how to take more advantage of the game at the end,” she said. “You can never really predict what anyone’s going to do, so that’s what it is.”
Maybe she’ll feel more comfortable with the randomness of the sport and the closeness to the Olympics in the days and years to come. But at the moment, she does sound like she’s trying to convince herself.
