In Speedskating, South Korea Sees a Fast Track to Olympic Glory

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“Are you next?” reads a placard in a glass display case in Seoul’s Gwacheon ice rink, where the next generation of Korean speedskaters take the ice each day — all dreaming of bringing home a medal in the country’s most popular winter sport.CreditCredit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times

SEOUL, South Korea — It was an off night for short-track speedskating at the Winter Olympics, but everywhere else around South Korea, the skating never ends. There are champions to build and rosters to fill for 2022, 2026 and beyond.

Two teenage boys, each expecting to be part of the South Korean team at the 2022 Beijing Games, zoomed around the old Gwacheon Ice Rink, heads down, moving as one. As they leaned hard and pumped their legs around one tight corner, a coach held a 9-year-old girl, standing on her skates, by the arms. With perfect timing, he flung her onto the ice, like a fisherman casting a net into the sea.

The rocket boost propelled her to speed and landed her in line with the boys, as if they all wore magnets. Three became one. Around they went.

Like the dozens of others who call the rink home, they practice six days a week, two or three hours each day.

“I have trained abroad,” said Lee Seung-Hwan, the kid-flinging coach and a member of South Korea’s long-track speedskating team at the 2002 Salt Lake Games. “I have never seen another country train its children as hard as we do here, from the time they are very young.”

Credit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times

With its single sheet of ice and pale yellow walls, Gwacheon is one of three primary rinks in the Seoul area where young skaters are molded into champions.

It is where the figure skater Yuna Kim, the gold medalist in the 2010 Vancouver Games, trained, along with several top speedskaters of the past 30 years, including members of this year’s Olympic team. In the hallways where boys and girls as young as 5 do their warm-up exercises, not far from the snack stand, glass cases display uniforms, skates and autographed photographs of past champions. There are bronzed hand prints of six of them. A big sign on the wall says, “World Star Zone.”

One of the display cases is empty, except for a placard.

“Are you next?” it reads.

In South Korea, figure skating captures the imagination, but speedskating captures the medals. Most Winter Olympics success comes in the short-track version of racing, that whirling dervish of a sport where power and grace can be upended instantly by minor collisions and mass wipeouts.

Before the Pyeongchang Games, South Korea had won 53 medals in its Winter Olympics history, and 42 were in short-track speedskating. (It was not until these Olympics that South Korea, part of the Winter Olympics since 1948, won a medal in a sport that did not include a skate. That was a gold in men’s skeleton, and Yun Sung-bin is now a national hero.)

It is wildly popular on television, the must-see event of the Olympics, and the names of its champions are carved deep in the collective memory.

Credit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times

At these Olympics, South Korea won three of the eight events in short-track speedskating, and six medals over all in the sport, more than any other country. Names like Choi Min-jeong, Shim Suk-hee and Kim Alang (all women) and Lim Hyo-jun (men’s 1,500 meter winner) and silver-medalist Hwang Dae-heon joined the pantheon.

Like the children at Gwacheon Ice Rink, they were trained as conventional speedskaters until the paths divided — one toward short-track speedskating, with its bursts of power and maneuverability (like driving a Ferrari on a go-kart track, as one coach at the rink said), the other toward long track, with its steady, graceful churn against only the clock.

More children than ever are sliding toward long track, their coaches and parents seeing a way toward the medal stand in a less-crowded field. The long-track events continue through Saturday, but with one night to go, South Korea had five medals. Only the Netherlands had more.

South Korea’s success in skating is unusual because there are not a lot of rinks in the country — a couple dozen regular-sized rinks, plus one long-track oval at Taereung National Training Center, a vast multi-sport complex in Seoul. (The oval built in Gangneung for the Olympics, about 100 miles away, is expected to be converted into a convention center.)

“In a way, it’s a good thing,” Lee, the coach, said. “Because of these limitations, because of the small numbers, we can really focus our support on these kids. Maybe that is a secret to the success.”

Credit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times

The group at Gwacheon numbers more than 100, divided into A, B and C groups, depending on ability. The C group is filled with young children, fitted with helmets, taught to crouch low, to cross their right legs over their left and power through corners. About three dozen are in the B group. Five are in A, including Lee Jin-woo, 15, the top skater of his age in the country.

“When I see the Olympic athletes go on the podium to get their medals, I feel very jealous, in a good way,” he said.

Lee expects to forge his future in long track, the same as Lee, his coach (they are not related), did. Choosing either short or long track can be difficult at a young age, since almost all training of children is done on regular-sized rinks, like those used for hockey or figure skating.

“We teach the power of how you skate, the speed and control,” said Choi Sung-hoon, the manager of the physical education department at Gwacheon Ice Rink.

The ability to navigate through crowds, the willingness to bump and grind with other skaters in short track, Choi said, is something deep inside some skaters more than others.

Credit...Margaret Cheatham Williams/The New York Times

“I think you are born with that skill,” he said.

Outside his office, groups of children jogged warm-up laps up and down the hallway. They crouched beside two-foot hurdles and, when a coach told them, jumped over them and landed in a crouch again.

Lee, the coach, wore a strap around his legs, the kind one might use to strap cargo to a car roof, and young skaters in the hall climbed inside the loop and leaned hard to the left, the way they would on the ice, to strengthen their leg muscles. They practiced the right-over-left movements as they side-winded down the hall, as low as they could go, pulling Lee with them.

In a training room, children carried each other on their backs and did deep knee bends. They stretched with large rubber bands. Even the youngest ones come every day of the week, except Monday.

On the ice, figure skaters twirled in the middle of the rink while more than a dozen of the best young speedskaters rushed around them in a single string, moving like a high-speed centipede. Lee, the tallest of the juniors, was at the head, in a speed suit with protective glasses on. Others followed him like crouching shadows, noses to backsides, mostly descending in size and age, all the way to a 9-year-old girl at the tail.

Two corners of the rink had crash pads, in case an accidental slip or trip sent any or all of the children crashing out of line. On this night, it did not happen.

Credit...Alexandra Garcia/The New York Times

“I’m a little afraid that I will fall,” said Park Ji-yoon, 11, who wants to be either a teacher or an Olympic speedskater when she grows up. “I just follow the person in front of me without thinking.”

The next day, Lee, the coach, drove three of his top boys to the national oval, a 45-minute drive across Seoul. They make the trip two or three times a week, practicing on the big oval with 200 or more other young skaters, under the tutelage of about 30 coaches, all hoping that they will be in the Olympics next time, or the time after that.

Tight strings of skaters wove circles around the vast sheet, the ones behind mimicking the one in front, so they all swirled as one, like schools of fish or flocks of birds.

Lee Jin-woo, the 15-year-old, led the two others from his home rink — Jeon Min-jae, 14, and An Sung-jun, 13. Lee, the coach, tracked them through the crowds of other skaters, the strings moving at different speeds. He held a stopwatch and barked orders at them as they glided past. Stay synchronized, he shouted near the end of the workout, as their collective rhythm disintegrated.

He knows he is hard on them. He knows that they talk about him when he is out of earshot. He was one of them once, too, before he became an Olympian.

“There’s a lot of potential in these kids,” he said. “They’ve already broken the records of the Olympians when they were this age.”

The boys came off the ice silently, then into a dressing room to remove their skates and catch their breath. Within minutes, they were back in Lee’s car, headed across Seoul, back to Gwacheon Ice Rink, closer to home.

They were going to practice another hour on the short track.