In Team Pursuit, Speedskaters Hope to Push Their Way to Victory

BEIJING — In speedskating’s team pursuit, the three team members skate single file, so close together that they move as if they were one six-legged skater, pushing and gliding in perfect unison.

The race hasn’t changed much through the years. But when the men’s team pursuit races begin here on Sunday, several countries will deploy a strategy that has upended conventional skating wisdom and helped the United States set a world record.

Traditionally, the lead skater peels off the front of the train every lap or two and reattaches to the back, grateful to let a teammate bear the brunt of wind resistance for a while. This year, though, some countries will leave one skater at the front for the entire eight-lap, 3,200-meter men’s race, with his teammates physically pushing the train forward with outstretched hands.

Observers say pushing is a major innovation that rivals the sport’s move to indoor competition, the introduction of the hinged “clap skate,” and the invention of the high-tech skin suit in its potential to greatly improve times.

“My hunch is, as you look at the team pursuit specifically, that this will probably be one of those paradigm shifts,” said Ingmar Jungnickel, the head of U.S. Speedskating’s sports science commission and an engineer for Specialized, the bicycle company.

U.S. Speedskating conceived the strategy in 2018, when preparations for the new four-year Olympic cycle began. Shane Domer, the organization’s high-performance director, knew the United States’ individual skaters likely would not be as strong as those from other countries, so he asked Jungnickel to model different strategies for the U.S. to try to excel in the team pursuit.

Jungnickel came back with the suggestion that the United States not exchange lead skaters. It was a radical idea. Because the skater in front fights the wind by himself — even indoors there is significant air resistance when skating faster than 30 miles per hour — the second skater might need to use only 80 percent as much energy to skate just as fast, and the third skater even less.

“We are looking at him like, ‘The first person will die,’” Domer said. “We will put the sacrificial lamb on the front and they’re going to die.” But after the team’s coaches talked it over, the idea was presented to athletes at a cycling camp in Boulder, Colo., and they immediately bought into it.

The United States team introduced pushing in competition in 2020 at the world championships in Salt Lake City. With Ethan Cepuran skating all eight laps in front of Emery Lehman and Ian Quinn, the group of unheralded Americans finished fifth, almost four seconds behind the victorious Dutch.

Domer said that the fifth-place finish “maximized the potential” of those skaters. For the Americans, finishing within four seconds of the mighty Dutch was a victory in itself.

The full potential of the strategy became clear in December 2021, again in Salt Lake City, when Casey Dawson, skating last in line, pushed Lehman, who pushed lead skater Joey Mantia. The team set a world record time in a World Cup event.

Mantia, who isn’t a long-distance skater and was so exhausted after the race that he lay splayed out on the ground for several seconds, said he thought his job in the front was actually the easiest. “I just get up front and lead the way, and these guys are pushing me so hard that I can basically just move my feet and they keep it, keep the rhythm and keep the speeds up,” he said.

Perhaps the reason the team works is because Lehman and Dawson also think their jobs are the easiest. “Every time I’m back there and I’m getting tired, I’m like, ‘OK, well, how tiring would it be to lead the whole thing?’” Lehman said.

The United States isn’t the first country to try pushing; the Canadians did it in 2010 en route to winning a gold medal at the Vancouver Olympics. What’s new is how frequently and how hard they push, combined with never relieving the front skater.

At first, Jungnickel said, the Americans considered a combination of pushing and interchanging the front skater. But, he said, “The model showed that pushing was more efficient than taking turns. If you take that logic to the extreme, you take no turns and only do pushing.”

That is as far as anyone will go in describing the U.S. strategy. While a number of other countries, most notably Norway, have adopted pushing, the Americans believe there are subtleties in how to do it that nobody else has discovered.

“There are some parts that other teams have copied, but there are other parts where the devil is in the details, where other teams haven’t figured out the details yet,” Jungnickel said. He also wouldn’t divulge how big the gains from the strategy were, only saying that they were “pretty substantial.”

The strategy is not as prevalent in the women’s team pursuit, which is six laps. For the Canadians, the favorites to win gold, Valérie Maltais leads the first lap and a half, Ivanie Blondin the next lap and a half and Isabelle Wiedemann the final three. Weidemann, who won a silver medal in the 5,000 meters, is 6 feet 2 inches tall, so the Canadian strategy is to use Maltais and Blondin to get Weidemann up to speed, and then Maltais and Blondin push.

“We’ve sort of adopted it, but we’ve adjusted it to our team dynamics,” Blondin said. “Izzy, Val I have a lot of strengths of our own that are not very much the same.”

The team pursuit requires a lot of practice, as most skaters compete in individual events and don’t spend much time skating right behind each other at speed. But learning the pushing technique also means skating in a different way. Typically, once they are up to speed, competitors skate with their left hand behind their back and their right hand either pumping on the outside or behind their back as well. There is no standard technique that includes holding a hand in front and pushing someone in the hip, back or butt.

In some ways, the American team’s preparation was helped by the coronavirus pandemic. Most skaters focus on training for their individual races first, and in some countries with more elite distance skaters, like the Netherlands, the ideal team pursuit group isn’t chosen until shortly before the Olympics, leaving little time to practice a new strategy. But all of the United States national team skaters train in Salt Lake City, and with the pandemic canceling a year’s worth of races, they had nothing but time to practice.

If the United States does not win team pursuit gold it will be a disappointment, but the skaters can take small consolation in knowing they have forever changed the event. Norway, which finished seventh in the 2020 world championships, in January 2021 won the overall team pursuit World Cup title with the tactic, freely admitting they stole it from the Americans. The strategy even has the mighty Dutch, the most noteworthy holdout, questioning whether to be followers in a sport they have come to dominate.

Sven Kramer, the perennial Dutch world champion, said acidly last year, “You can see now that this pushing is faster, whatever you think about it.”