Mass start’s Olympic inclusion ups the ante for speedskater Ivanie Blondin

CALGARY – A lot changes in a sport when there’s Olympic medals on the line. Ivanie Blondin wants to stay on top of those changes from now until the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.

The International Olympic Committee declared in June that the mass start will be added to the Olympic long-track speedskating program in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Blondin claimed both the overall World Cup title and a world championship silver in mass start in the weeks prior to the IOC’s announcement.

With Olympic medals now on the table, the 25-year-old from Ottawa expects a ramping up of tactics in what was already a cat-and-mouse marathon.

Blondin will race her first World Cup mass start since the IOC’s declaration Sunday at the Olympic Oval in Calgary.

“I think I’m going to have an even bigger target on me this year,” Blondin said Monday at the Oval. “Last year, I feel the mass start event wasn’t really thought out very well by the other teams too much, but this year I think they’re going to go into it really having game plans down before the races and having tactics.

“Most of them will probably revolve around me and (Irene) Schouten because it was kind of a battle between both of us last season.”

Mass start brings elements of short-track speedskating to the long-track oval. The skaters leave the start line at the same time for 16 laps of jockeying and jostling for position.

Points are awarded for three intermediate sprints during the race and the final sprint to the finish, but the points are weighted so first, second and third over the finish line earn the medals.

Blondin will also race 1,000 and the 3,000 metres in the season-opening World Cup starting Friday at the Oval. The men’s and women’s mass start is Sunday.

Blondin was among 25 Canadians named to the host World Cup team at a news conference Monday.

She started short-track speedskating at age 14 and switched to long-track at 20. Blondin isn’t the only former short-tracker who has donned the clap skate.

Olivier Jean of Lachenaie, Que., helped Canada win Olympic men’s relay gold in short track in 2010. He’ll make his international long-track debut this weekend in the 1,500.

Other Canadians to watch include Jordan Belchos of Toronto and transplanted Dutchman Ted-Jan Bloemen of Calgary. They both beat the national record in the 10,000 metres at fall trials with Bloemen the current record-holder.

Bloemen, Belchos and Denny Morrison won team pursuit silver at the 2015 world single-distance championship. Morrison, an double Olympic medallist in 2014, isn’t racing in Calgary. He’s still recovering his racing form after a spring motorcycle accident.

Calgary’s Gilmore Junio and Kaylin Irvine, Regina’s Kali Christ, Marsha Hudey of White City, Sask., Brianne Tutt of Airdrie, Alta., and William Dutton of Humboldt, Sask., are the 2014 Olympians also racing for Canada on home ice.

Blondin isn’t expecting an immediate influx of women into the mass start now that it’s an Olympic event. She’s spoken to other long-trackers who aren’t interested in it because of the body contact.

But her coach Mark Wild believes other countries will start investing more athlete manpower into mass start over the next two and half years leading into Pyeongchang.

“The field is going to deepen,” Wild said. “There’s going to be more people doing it, but the best athletes are going to get better.”

A teamwork dynamic is emerging in mass start whereby one skater works in service of another — like cycling’s domestique — to run interference, chase down breakaways and provide a body to draft behind.

“The way we look at it is it’s an individual race, but you need to approach it from a team perspective,” Wild explained. “We’re developing tactics of our own to compete against other countries, other athletes.”

Blondin is anxious to re-establish herself this season as one of the best women in the world at the new Olympic event.

“Until the first World Cup kind of goes down, you don’t know where you are internationally just yet,” she said. “I want to perform to my best potential and make my country proud like I did last season.”