Long Track Speed Skating

RICHMOND, B.C. -- Jeremy Wotherspoon's checkered Olympic history has taught him how to leave the past behind, and that's exactly what he's doing with a training-race fall exactly one week before the 500 metres is contested at the Vancouver Games.

The long track speed skating star from Red Deer, Alta., said Tuesday he was both unhurt and unfazed by his slip in Monday's trial run, which occurred as he headed into the final turn of his 500 skate, and that when the event goes down for real Feb. 15, the incident will be far from his mind.

"When I get on the ice I probably won't even be thinking about it," he said. "It's in the past now and it will probably just make me more focused and more concentrated on what I'm doing at the moment.

"Everything has an effect, so it has some effect. But mostly, that's one of the reasons we do the training races, is just to see how the ice changes from training to racing and see how I feel and how I skate under that situation, so it was good to get a feel for how things change a little bit and to know what to expect next week."

The calmness about the 33-year-old is good news for someone to whom the word fall carries so much baggage. Wotherspoon stumbled at the 500's start in stunning fashion as the can't miss favourite at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. He sought redemption at the '06 Games in Turin but underperformed bitterly. And in 2008 he broke his left arm so badly he needed plates and screws to fix it after a crash at a World Cup in Berlin.

But all that was then, this is now, and sometimes strange things happen. On Monday, he found a rut, his skate didn't take and he slipped. No point in looking for omens because of one freak moment, especially with him no worse for the wear.

"I'm at the point now where I'm not worried about trying to make up for other events -- not that I should -- I think I've just learned not to worry about that," said Wotherspoon. "Each race is its own experience and I want it to be something I look back on and treasure."

That's why he was in good spirits Tuesday as the Canadian long-track team leader Brian Rahill dropped a canister holding sheets with the athletes' written Olympic dreams into the towering Inukshuk that sits in front of Speed Skating Canada House.

The Vancouver Games will be his fourth and final Olympics, this is his final season as a speed skater, and he's intent on enjoying every last bit of it. Especially after a trying start to the year threatened to derail his comeback from the broken arm.

"I feel fine," said Wotherspoon. "I've raced a lot, so I know what to do, and I just want to enjoy that. I don't have a lot more races in my career so there's no sense shying away from the race, or dreading it, or letting it become a stressful event because there's going to be a lot more stressful events in my life. This is fun and it's something I'm sure I'm going to miss so I want to really be into every minute of every day at these Games."

More complicated is trying to figure where the 500-metre world-record holder ranks in a fairly wide-open field heading into the Games. South Koreans Lee Kang-Seok and Lee Kyou-Hyuk along with Mika Poutala of Finland and American Tucker Fredricks sit atop the World Cup rankings but all can be beaten on any given day.

Wotherspoon has had few opportunities this year to measure himself against them and will be somewhat of a wild-card next week. Until then, even he won't be ready to say where he's at.

"You never know until your race," he said. "On the ice I do feel good, I feel like I have a lot of flow going and a lot of confidence in the ability I have to repeat the good things I'm doing day-to-day, and things feel a lot more natural than they did three or four months ago.

"I feel pretty happy with that, and it's just a matter of bringing that into my races next week."

And of leaving the past behind.