Is Sweden’s Olympic skater, gold medalist and world record holder a fool?
Olympics Jerk Watch is a long-standing function that subjectively rates the jerky (or lack thereof) of the biggest stars of summer and winter games.
Candidate: Nils van der Poel
Homeland: Sweden
Known for: Set world records, be a “character”, pick on the Dutch
Why he can be an idiot: Swedish skating superstar Nils van der Poel has had an excellent Olympics. He has won two gold medals, in the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters, setting a new world record for 10,000 meters and a new Olympic record for 5,000 meters.
What made these victories even sweeter, from van der Poel’s perspective, was that each of them came at the direct expense of a rival athlete from the Netherlands. The silver medalist in both 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters in Beijing was the Dutch skater Patrick Roest. This must have made van der Poel feel good, because van der Poel loves to wear one the Dutch.
The Swedes and the Dutch are natural rivals, I guess. (I refuse to factually verify this assumption, but it sounds true.) Although van der Poel has a Dutch heritage, his family background has not in any way prevented him from frying the Dutch at every opportunity. As a junior skater in 2015, according to an entertaining New York Times article, van der Poel and the American skater Emery Lehman once fooled the Dutch junior team by sneaking into their rooms and hiding raw fish everywhere. (They bought the fish at a gas station, which indicates either that the gas station was particularly nice or that the fish was particularly disgusting.) “The Dutch came back and it smells like fish everywhere,” van der Poel told the Times. “And the Norwegians simply got all the blame for it!” To take a foul-smelling prank and let Norway take the blame for it is one of the classic characteristics of a prank.
Nowadays, van der Poel has graduated to more open trolling of the Dutch. At an ice skating competition in Germany in October, van der Poel was sitting in the stands when Patrick Roest skated 5,000 meters and clinked a cooking bell in front of a homemade banner that read “Patrick, Hup Hup” with a Dutch flag indented in the corner and some small hearts near bottom. This pro-wrestling-style heel irritated retired Dutch skater Erben Wennemars, who called it a “strange act” on Twitter and noted that “Great masters are anxious about their own preparations.” Talking to a Dutch website later van der Poel speculated that Roest may have appreciated the support, noting that he at least “thought it was fun.” It was a little fun! But also kind of jerky!
Since he came to Beijing, van der Poel has become more serious – by talking shit about Dutch people, that is. After winning the 5,000-meter race, van der Poel sharp criticism Dutch skating officials at a press conference because they allegedly tried to tamper with the ice conditions at the Olympic skating rink in Beijing to make them more favorable for Dutch skaters. How to make ice cream more Dutch remains a scientific mystery. But by taking his accusations to an article published on a Dutch skating website, van der Poel called it “corruption” on a par with doping and suggested it was his “moral duty” to force the question. The Dutch, of course, denied that they had manipulated the ice in Beijing in their favor, and Patrick Roest wondered if van der Poel was only trying to play the main game before the 10,000-meter race. If that was van der Poel’s plan, yes, it worked! It turns out that jerks are very good at main games.
The Dutch are not the only ones that van der Poel likes to razza. 2021, when he broke the then world record in the 10,000-meter race, which had been held by the Canadian Graeme Fish, van der Poel yelled “Eat fish for dinner!” at a TV camera. While it’s a very good idea, health-wise, it’s also a kind of jerky thing to say, basically the equivalent of shouting “Suck it!” Do you know who likes to tell others to suck it? Jerk.
Do you know what van der Poel hates more? The actual skating, apparently. His training routine for skating is often about doing all but speed skating: running and cycling long distances, skydiving, joining the army for a year. During the Beijing Games, van der Poel announced that “ice skating sucks”; after winning the 10,000-meter race, he suggested that he might retire from the sport completely. If so, ice skating would surely mourn the loss of one of its most talented athletes, as well as one of its most entertaining jerks.
Why he may not be an idiot: In speedskating circles, I understand, hating the Dutch is a bit like hating the New York Yankees, or New England Patriots, or Duke men’s basketball: less a reflection on the hater’s personality than on the hater’s dominance. The Netherlands has dominated ice skating in the world for the past decade. At the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Dutch skaters won gold in all but one of the men’s skating competitions and in three of the six women’s competitions – and they won fewer medals in all competitions they did not win. They were something less dominant in 2018, and took home only seven of 14 possible gold medals over all competitions for men and women, and won zero medals in any of the 500-meter races. The Dutch have been so dominant in skating since 2014: A “bad Olympics” for them is one where they only win 16 skating medals.
Sweden, on the other hand, won zero skating medals in neither 2014 nor 2018. Including van der Poel’s two medals in Beijing, the Swedes have only won 18 skating medals in the history of the Winter Olympics – five fewer skating medals than the Netherlands won in 2014 alone. With these different national stories in mind, van der Poel’s braggadocio seems less jerky than brave. There is almost an element of heroism in his ongoing commitment to fighting Big Speedskating, which is represented by the Dutch.
For what it’s worth, even though there may have been some playfulness in van der Poel’s decision to shout about the alleged Dutch ice scandal in Beijing, it does not mean that he was wrong when he raised the matter. IN the article that interrupted van der Poel, the Dutch ice researcher Sander van Ginkel suggested that he had lobbied Beijing’s ishoncho Mark Messer to make “adjustments that are in our favor”: ie to make the ice harder, because the Dutch like hard ice. (So it is how to make ice more Dutch!) “Many other countries produce riders who have more of a (shorter) kind and for whom hard ice is of less importance”, said van Ginkel in the article. Well, “hard ice” to you, Sander van Ginkel! Maybe you’re the real jerk here!
In fact, van der Poel seems less like a jerk than an individualist, and although there are often lots of intersections between the two headings, they are not always synonymous. He seems to have a complicated relationship with skating, and is basically against the Dutch training method, where big skaters pay salaries and receive sponsorship and skate all year round. Van der Poel prefers more liberal methods. “I feel that the atmosphere in our sport is sometimes a little too serious. Ice skating is so sterile, there is so much competition, so much measurement, it’s so much about lap times … We have to remember that we also have to have fun.” he told a Dutch news outlet. It is difficult to argue against this philosophy, especially in the light of van der Poel’s findings in Beijing.
Jerk results: I give Nils van der Poel 2 out of 3 points for style, because he should also have brought an air horn to the race where he conjured Patrick Roest. 0.5 out of 3 for technical qualifications, because, after all, he is not the one with an advanced degree in ice science. 3 out of 3 for execution, because even though it’s one thing to talk shit about Dutch people, it’s a completely different thing to back it up with gold medals and world records. And 0 out of 1 in the category “has he mooned anyone yet at the Olympics?” 5.5 out of 10 for Nils van der Poel, and I reserve the right to change this score if and when he really moans someone before the games end. Next!