‘I’m a fighter’: Canadian speedskater Ivanie Blondin pulls herself out of dark hole and captures Olympic silver in mass start

Opinion

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This article was published 19/02/2022 (1325 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEIJING Ivanie Blondin locked herself in her room. She had come to the Olympics and skated poorly in two races and that meant she was beating herself up again, calling herself a failure again, looking in the mirror and not liking what she saw. She’d been there before.

“I was pretty quiet for a couple days,” Blondin said after skating to a silver medal in the women’s mass start, Canada’s fifth long-track speedskating medal of the Games. “I didn’t talk to anyone, and when I drove to training I had the headphones in. It was a lot of internal stuff going on. I just wasn’t very wasn’t very nice to myself in the first couple days.”

She’s been there before. After Pyeongchang, Blondin felt crushed by the sport. She finished sixth, fifth and fourth in two individual events and the team pursuit, plus fell in the mass start, in which she was expected to win a medal. The 31-year-old has spoken about how she dipped into depression and anxiety, and how she left a practice once in tears after seeing a Pyeongchang highlight pack on the oval Jumbotron. She would go to the oval in Calgary and feel anxious the whole way: anxious to walk in the door, anxious to show herself.

She pulled out of that with hikes in the Rockies, or spending time with her coterie of animals and with her husband, Hungarian speedskater Konrád Nagy. Blondin had real success on the World Cup circuit the last few years in multiple distances, and topped the abbreviated season rankings in the mass start — a race for fighters, for competitors, for strategists with strong legs. Blondin was a short-track skater. It helped.

But here, Blondin opened by finishing 14th in the 3,000. She spent those two days in her room. She watched “Emily in Paris” on Netflix to turn her brain off; she spent some time crying. It felt familiar.

“There was one point where I was ready to go home,” said Blondin. “I was like, I was so hard on myself.”

She caught herself.

“I’m gonna cry,” she said.

She didn’t cry.

“Mentally I kind of shut down. I kept telling myself that I was a failure, again, and I made the mistake of going into that deep dark hole: You’re a failure, you didn’t skate well, what was that? You know?

“And it was hard, and I was pushing people away that were close to me. And because that’s what my defence mechanism is, I want to be alone. Just leave me alone. I’m gonna suffer on my own.”

But she didn’t. She reached out to her husband, who isn’t here. She FaceTimed her animals, which include a parrot named Gizmo who sometimes tells her to put hockey on TV, and a great magnificent Saint Bernard-Pyrenees mix named Brooke. She FaceTimed some girlfriends in Calgary and some family, including her brother in New Brunswick. He is a police officer and was about to arrest someone when she called.

The 1,500 was another tough race, and she finished 13th. At the last Olympics, things got worse and worse and worse; this time she stopped locking herself away. She hung around with figure skaters Paul Poirier and Piper Gillies; she relied on team media attache Nicole Espenant, team skate technician Reece Derraugh and team physiotherapist Lauren Vickery.

“I think at the end of the day, I’m just just grateful for the people that I have around me and helping me,” she said.

Coaches pulled Blondin from the 5,000 in order to preserve her for the team pursuit, and Blondin pulled Canada back into the race in her 600-metre leg before Isabelle Weidemann brought Canada home for gold.

And then came the mass start. The Ottawa native had won her semifinal with a smart, aggressive race not because she had to win the sprints in it, but she did just to be competitive. In the final, she skated smart, coolly navigating heavy traffic. Someone pulled her backwards by the hips at one point and she battled back up to speed. Blondin loves the physicality of this race. As she says, “I’m like a fighter in a way. When girls kind of grab me and push me and all this like it just fires me up. I don’t shy away from these situations. I push back. I fight my way through the race.”

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She fought. Blondin passed Dutch star Irene Schouten with 500 metres to go and she tried to hold on; she thought later it may have been too early. Schouten already had two individual golds in the 3,000 and 5,000 at these Games. She is a hard skater to hold off. Blondin was passed at the line, and Canada had silver. Hell of a race.

“I’m a fighter, and I’m proud that I fought through that moment and brought myself back,” said Blondin. “At the end of the day, I’m going to go home and my family is still gonna be just as happy if I win a medal or if I didn’t win a medal. (My dog) doesn’t know that I’m an Olympic medallist.

“But at the same time I think I’m most proud of the comeback that I made, and how deep of a hole that I was in after 2018. And even these past two weeks, I was not in a great place a week ago. So to be able to come back, and the girls and myself individually today, I’m very proud of that.”

We have talked more and more about mental health in sports, and it is to the good. Blondin said she hoped she could show people that when you are struggling, you can make it better. And in some cases that’s true. In this one, what helped Blondin was people. The people around her, the people she loved, and a determination: She would forgive herself this time. She is a fighter, on and off the ice.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur