Speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics – Women's 5000 metres en route to finishing second, only started competing in long track skating a year before the Games, although she and her sisters had proven almost unbeatable in marathon skating, which is performed in groups. Prior to this competition, the existing world and Olympic records were as follows. The following new world and Olympic records were set during this competition. Speed skating at the 2002 Winter Olympics – Women's 5000 metres The Women's 5000 m speed skating competition for the 2002 Winter Olympics was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, United States. Claudia Pechstein secures her third gold medal in the
Winter Olympic Games War since the Soviet Union first participated at the 1956 Winter Games. It did not take long for the Cold War combatants to discover what a powerful propaganda tool the Olympic Games could be. The advent of the state-sponsored "full-time amateur athlete" of the Eastern Bloc countries further eroded the ideology of the pure amateur, as it put the self-financed amateurs of the Western countries at a disadvantage. The Soviet Union entered teams of athletes who were all nominally students, soldiers, or working in a profession, but many of whom were in reality paid by the state to train on