A quick, reassuring look at the monitor: “I still have it!” Claudia Pechstein stated. Then she turned to the last group of questioners in the Beijing Ice Arena. The competition was still in full swing, but Pechstein already suspected that she would finish last in the standings; the best runners around the Dutch European Champion Irene Schouten hadn’t even squatted at the start. But still: At that time, Claudia Pechstein from Berlin, 49 years old, still held the Olympic record of 3:57.70 minutes on this 3000 meter distance, set in 2002 in Salt Lake City. At least this last quarter of an hour.
Then that was over too: Schouten won, shot to the finish line in 3:56.93, snatched the Olympic victory and record in passing. And Claudia Pechstein, five-time Olympic champion? Remained determined to maintain her personal happiness.
“There are so many Olympic champions, but not so many flag bearers,” she explained after her race. The fact that she was allowed to lead the German team at the opening ceremony the night before was one reason why she might not have been floating on ice that Saturday afternoon in Beijing, but she was certainly on a cloud. And with the first skating step in the oval, she had created further facts: She is now the first woman to compete in eight Olympic Games. So far, only one man, the Japanese ski jumper Noriaki Kasai, has succeeded. To sharpen things up a bit according to Pechstein’s example: there are many flag-bearers, but not record participants.
Before this lifetime achievement, she knew, all the other numbers of the day moved into the small print, including the fact that with her 4:17.16 minutes she was 20 seconds behind Schouten, who was 20 years her junior and to whom she lost her 20-year-old Olympic course record . “That’s a victory for me,” she said, “I can’t stop beaming.”
Another flag: Claudia Pechstein chooses to be the record participant at the Winter Games on the sidelines of the 3000 meter race.
(Photo: Drawer Singer/Imago)
Lost a record, but won an even more important triumph, that is the double helix in which Claudia Pechstein has been moving for years. Anyone who thinks that she has lost her ambition just because she can no longer beat the lap times of the younger ones shortly before her 50th birthday is probably wrong. She no longer only runs against her competitors. She runs to assert and consolidate her own place – in the long, glorious history of her sport. Speed skating has been part of the Olympic program since the first Winter Games in 1924.
“Normally I have to have the Chinese in the sack,” she explained after the 3,000-meter duel against direct opponent Ahenaer Adake, who was also a few steps ahead of her. “But she said to me, ‘I’m running against a legend.’ And it goes down like oil.” It wasn’t easy to walk, she added, “with all the compliments on my mind, but I’m happy to take that with me. Because, unfortunately, you don’t hear that very often in the media in Germany.”
She was pleased that her old rival Gunda Niemann-Stirnemann congratulated her on being chosen as the flag bearer – that Gunda Niemann from Erfurt, who was the most successful international athlete in speed skating in the 1990s. And that the announcer in the stadium praised her historical uniqueness as a record woman at the Olympics did not escape her notice either. The question now is how Claudia Pechstein – five-time gold medal winner, most successful German Olympic winter athlete, record Olympic participant, oldest anyway – wants to further outdo her own exceptional position, i.e. herself. First she goes back onto the ice in the Beijing Oval, in two weeks, on the penultimate day of competition, over 5000 meters with a mass start. And then she has to search: will she find another record that she can set or break?
