Day 10 and Clara's Last Race

The Ladies 5K race is today.

Nancy and Linda are attending the race.  They have seats directly across from the finish line.

The two of them go seated and soon found themselves surrounded by Dutch fans.

The in house video scans the crowd all the time between races and because of the Dutch around them they got on the video screens for all to see a few times.

Racing started and Cindy was in the first pair.  She skated against an American and did her best.  But because of the surgery and the time recovering she didn't do too well.

There were only eight pairs, so four pairs skated then there was a flood, then the final four pairs skated.

Clara was in fifth pair, the one right after the flood.  Fresh ice.  She came off the line and though her opener wasn't as fast as the current leader, it was good.

From that point on she lowered and lowered the lap times.  She finished below 7 minutes and set a track record.  The crowd went KNUTTTTSSS!!!!! Every lap they got louder if that was possible.

Pair six wasn't a serious threat.

Pair seven, the skater from Germany blasted off the line and was consistantly faster than Clara. She finished ahead of Clara, which put Clara in the Silver medal position with two skaters to come.

Pair Eight.  Sablakova, the current world record holder was in this pair.  She was paired with another German skater. Sablakova lowered the times lap by lap.  For a while the German in her pair stayed with her and everyone's fears were that Clara would be edged off the podium.  I guess those early attempts to stick with the lead skater tired the German, because with 4 to go, she started to fall back.  The time clock would show the accumulated time on the board and what the projected finish place would be.  So, when the German girl went through the line in a project fourth place the place when crazy.

That fourth place held up and our Clara was a Bronze medalist in her last race in her last Olympics.

I took Nancy and Linda over to SSC house and showed them the Speed Skating family.  They meet Clara's family and all the people from Calgary that Nancy knew.

Linda was impressed with the whole aura around the place.  We watched the hockey game, we watched short track and bob sled competitions.  Every goal, every race brought out cheers from everyone.  Linda couldn't get over the way that the Speed Skating people cheered everyone.  It was a lot of fun.

Tomorrow is a day off then we have two days of pursuits, the qualifiers, the semis.  The finals are on Saturday.  Day Last.