Pechstein, Claudia

▪ 2003

      When the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, ended on Feb. 24, 2002, Claudia Pechstein of Germany had carved out a remarkable place for herself in the history of long-track speed skating. Pechstein took the gold medal in the 3,000-m and 5,000-m finals, 13 days apart, winning both with world-record performances. She thus raised her career total to four golds among seven Olympic medals.

      By capturing the 5,000-m Olympic gold for the third time in succession, Pechstein also became only the second skater in history (after American Bonnie Blair) to make a successful defense of an Olympic title twice. She did so with rare consistency, posting lap times within a narrow range of 32.05–32.48 sec on all 11 laps of the 400-m track after the first 600 m of the race. Pechstein finished off a brilliant effort in 6 min 46.91 sec—a 5¹/₂-second improvement on the former world standard.

      In the 3,000-m final, she hit the finish line in 3 min 57.70 sec, taking 1¹/₂ seconds off the former world record she had set 11 months earlier in Nagano, Japan. Pechstein was the only skater in the field who covered each lap of the race faster than 32 seconds and the first skater ever to cover 3,000 m in less than 4 minutes. Her victory in Salt Lake City marked the second time that she had beaten the 4-minute barrier and the fifth world-record performance of her career.

      Pechstein had taken home at least one medal from each of the four Winter Olympics in which she participated, starting with the 5,000-m bronze in Albertville, France, in 1992. She won her first Olympic gold two years later, finishing first in the 5,000 m in Lillehammer, Nor., where she also won her second bronze, for the 3,000 m. At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Pechstein repeated her gold-medal performance at the 5,000 m and took silver in the 3,000 m.

      Pechstein was born in East Berlin on Feb. 22, 1972. She began figure skating at age three and switched to speed skating at age nine. She first came on the international scene at 16, when she finished second overall in the 1988 world junior speed-skating championships in Seoul, S.Kor. During much of her career, she skated in the shadow of her teammate Gunda Niemann-Stirnemann, whom she beat for the gold by 0.04 sec in Nagano, in the closest women's 5,000 m in Olympic history. In 2000 Pechstein won the overall world speed-skating championship, having finished second to her compatriot in each of the previous four years. She finished second to another teammate, Anni Friesinger, in 2001 and third behind Friesinger and Canadian Cindy Klassen in 2002, but in Salt Lake City Pechstein was unquestionably number one.

Ron Reid

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