Word: skates
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...costumes. But Daniel Wende of Germany, you cannot bejewel a gladiator outfit. And Roman Talan of Ukraine, no one wants to see your underpants through your white getup. Perhaps it's no coincidence that their pairs finished at the bottom of the 20-team draw. When you watch a skating event closely, it's fun to pinpoint the differences between the best and worst competitors - besides the tendency of low-scoring athletes to skate with their asses. For the pairs at the back of the pack, their spinning is hardly synchronized. Here, the guy is spinning faster than...
More than a quarter of the country sits below sea level, so flood control is a major priority. Thus, when canals freeze over, Dutch fans explain that skating on them is cathartic. We have conquered our enemy. Let's celebrate by running our blades all over it! Skating is so ingrained in Dutch DNA that fans talk about one particular race, the "Eleven-City Tour," with the sort of reverence normally shown by global soccer fans for their favorite teams. The Eleven-City Tour is a 125-mile skate over frozen lakes and canals in the northern Dutch province...
They approach the starting line, two at a time, before an official with a French accent asks them if they're "re-dee?" The gun goes off, and they skate quietly around a 400-meter oval, swaying side-to-side, one hand on resting on their lower back. There's one lap, two laps; a little over a dozen laps during this 5,000-meter event, round and round for more than six minutes. They race against the times of the 26 other skaters in the competition, not their neighbor on the ice. As spectator sports go, long-track speed...
With their face paint and unruly orange wigs, these people seem not to realize there's no real reason to get all excited about watching people skate in circles. Of course, you could say the same about NASCAR, but at least the cars jostle against each other for prime position, and there's a finish line in sight. Plus, when a car whizzes by you at 200 m.p.h., there's an adrenaline rush. As for humans gliding by you at 35 m.p.h. on skates, they don't even register a breeze. (See 25 Winter Olympic athletes to watch...
Speak to enough good people from the Netherlands, however, and you begin to appreciate their love of the sport. Ice-skating began more than 1,000 years ago, on the frozen canals and waterways of Scandinavia and Holland. By the 1600s, speed skating became a useful form of transportation for the Dutch, who used their blades to travel between villages. The Netherlands doesn't get much snow, and there are no mountains, so skiing is out of the question. But it gets cold, and the county's frozen winter waterways offer ample opportunities for outdoor skating. "In Holland, kids learn...