Beijing‘s new speed skating hall, dubbed the “Ice Ribbon,” has already seen a series of competitions over the past seven days, including an exciting physics experiment on time and space now on Saturday. The test arrangement looked like this: Thirty sprinters competed. For 29 athletes, the competition started at 4 p.m.; for an athlete at 9 o’clock. The question to be examined was: Can the one who starts seven hours late be faster than most of the others?
The result from the point of view of Joel Dufter, who made himself available as a test subject: It worked moderately, but not differently than expected. He has overtaken four runners, 25 were ahead of him, above all the new Olympic champion Gao Tingyu from China. In the sprint over 500 meters, Dufter finished 26th. “The power just wasn’t there yet,” he said, which everyone in the hall understood: because his internal clock was still ticking according to Upper Bavarian, more precisely Central European Time (CET), while for the rest of the field China Standard Time (CST ) was valid.
The 26-year-old had arrived in Beijing by plane barely 48 hours before his first competition, as a latecomer to the delegation from his association, the German Speed Skating and Short Track Association, because he had to recover from a corona infection in Inzell.
He only had one day to rehearse in the elegantly curved hall with the surrounding, illuminated bands that gave the new building the “Ice Ribbon” name. The race in 35.37 seconds was “technically sound”, he said, but after the long journey he lacked freshness and liveliness. The Chinese Gao Tingyu, Olympic third in 2018, who won in 34.32 seconds in front of the Korean Cha Min Kyu and the Japanese Wataru Morishige, was already a step faster than the rest of the field. That was clear to scent as soon as he saw him start the first hundred meters.
Immediately after the infection, he himself noticed that he had temporarily lost the ease of movement on the laps: “The static on the ice quickly goes a bit whistle.”
Fragrance’s most important competition, the 1000 meters, is still to come
The fact that he even scraped the curve, landing in Beijing shortly before the end of the season, so to speak, was a win in itself. Fragrance was infected in January and he felt symptoms: signs of a cold, sore throat and headache. After seven days he was able to leave the quarantine. The CT value of his PCR test was in the critical threshold for Germany of 30, but initially did not meet the strict regulations of the Chinese, which set the limit at 35.
“So we have included a time buffer,” said Dufter. “Not that I arrive in Beijing and go straight back into quarantine.” A fate like that of the Nordic combined athletes Frenzel and Weber or the figure skater Seegert, who spent days in confinement, should be avoided at China’s Corona Games. After the small DESG team took off on January 29 without the only sprinter on board, Dufter continued to do his rounds in Inzell for the time being, always accompanied by the question: is this going to happen? Or was it for naught?
Arriving in China, he decided, in coordination with the Norwegian private team, which he joined last year, to keep the German daily rhythm for the time being because of the few hours that remained until the first competition. The seven hour time difference was initially ignored.
He counteracts jet lag by sleeping late at night, but he sleeps longer in the morning. “Pushing the day back” is what he calls it, and he wants to keep it that way in the coming days, because his most important competition, the 1000 meters, is only scheduled for February 18th. A year ago, Dufter finished third at the European Championships over this distance, and he thinks he has better chances there. It will be part two of the man’s experiment, gliding through two time zones on skids.
