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Speed skating at the 2014 Winter Olympics – Men's 1500 metres

The men's 1500 metres speed skating competition of the 2014 Winter Olympics was held at Adler Arena Skating Center on 15 February 2014.[1]

The 2010 Olympic champion, Mark Tuitert of the Netherlands, sought to defend his title; he bettered the track record, but eventually finished fifth. Poland's Zbigniew Bródka won the gold medal, the Netherlands' Koen Verweij took silver, and Canada's Denny Morrison took the bronze. After Verweij's race in the last pair of the event, it took about half a minute before it was announced that Bródka had beaten Verweij's time by 3 thousandths of a second, which is 4.1 cm, given the finishing speed of Verweij being 49.4 km/h. Measurements in thousandths were only introduced in speed skating after the 2010 Olympics, so this was the closest win in Olympic speed skating history.[2][3] Two comparably narrow victories had previously been recorded at the Olympics overall. At the 1998 Winter Olympics, Silke Kraushaar beat her teammate Barbara Niedernhuber by 0.002 seconds in the Women's luge event,[2] while at the 1972 Summer Olympics Karl Gunnar Larsson beat Tim McKee by 0.002 seconds in the 400 meters individual swimming medley. The latter narrow win in effect brought about a change so that no swimming competition henceforward would have to be decided by a margin less than a hundredth of a second.[4]

The gold medal awarded in this event featured a Chelyabinsk meteor fragment to commemorate the first anniversary of this meteor strike.[5]

Qualification

A total of forty speed skaters could qualify for this distance, with a maximum of four skaters per country. The top 20 of the men's 1500 metres World Cup standings after World Cup 4 in Berlin secured a spot for their country. Then the additional 20 spots were awarded based on a time ranking of all times skated in the World Cup. A reserve list was also made.[6]

Competition schedule

All times are (UTC+4).

Records

Prior to this competition, the existing world and Olympic records were as follows.

At the 2013 World Single Distance Speed Skating Championships the track record was set by Denis Yuskov at 1:46,32. At the 2013–14 Russian Single Distance Championships Yuskov improved this track record skating 1:45.85.[7]

The following records were set during this competition.

TR = track record

Results

The races were started at 17:30.[8]

Silver medalist Koen Verweij

TR = track record

References

  1. ^ "Speed Skating Schedule and Results – Men's 1500 m". SOOC. Archived from the original on 15 February 2014. Retrieved 15 February 2014.
  2. ^ a b Frank Thomas, Dead heats or not - Olympic timing differs by sport, Europe Online Magazine, 16 Feb 2014
  3. ^ At both the 1956 and 1960 Winter Olympics two skaters shared the gold medal at this same distance when they clocked a time within one tenth of a second of each other.
  4. ^ "Munich 1972." Archived 2013-10-06 at the Wayback Machine Swedish Olympic Committee, 2008. Retrieved 2012-05-01.
  5. ^ Augustine, Bernie (25 July 2013). "Select gold medals at Sochi Olympics will include meteorite fragments to commemorate Russian meteor strike". New York Daily News. NYDailyNews.com.
  6. ^ Qualification of NOC event quota places for the Olympic Winter Games 2014 based on Special Olympic Qualification Classification (SOQC) as of December 9, 2013 Archived January 16, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  7. ^ "Visitenkarte der Eisbahn: Adler Arene Sotschi". speedskatingnews. Retrieved 5 February 2014.
  8. ^ Final Results