Synchronized skating, a figure skating discipline, and a mass start speed skating event open to both long track and short track athletes could be on the program for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
International Skating Union President Ottavio Cinquanta told the Tribune on Monday that his federation has formally asked the International Olympic Committee to consider adding both.
The request is in the hands of the IOC’s executive board, which will approve the final 2018 program and athlete quotas next April.
“I don’t know if the IOC will approve both,” Cinquanta said by telephone, “and I have not made propaganda for one over the other.”
Cinquanta said the proposals received the support of the ISU Congress this summer. He hopes to discuss them with the new head of the Pyeongchang Olympic Organizing Committee in the next month.
The synchronized skating proposal could be more problematic because it would add more than 150 athletes, coaches and support staff at a time when the IOC is trying to help Olympic organizing committees hold down costs.
Here are some of the details, as provided by Cinquanta:
*Synchronized skating would include “nine or 10” teams of 16 competitors each. All would compete in a short program, and six would advance to the free skate final.
There were 23 teams from 18 countries at the 2014 Synchronized Skating World Championships, with five countries having earned two entries each. That number would be pared for the Olympics through a yet-to-be-determined qualification system.
Cinquanta said the ISU would prefer the teams be all women. But, he added, if the IOC asks for mixed teams, the ISU would propose 14 women and two men.
He said that synchro would not replace the team event, which debuted at the 2014 Winter Olympics, and adding synchro would not require either an extra day of competition or an extra ice sheet.
*The mass start speed skating races, one for men and one for women, would have 16 laps on a long-track oval without lanes, with the lap distance reduced from 400 to 388 meters. Skaters would wear transponders to verify lap counts and finish positions.
Cinquanta envisions fields of a maximum 24 men and 24 women divided into semifinals, with the top eight in each semifinal advancing to the final.
Competitors would come from athletes already qualified in either long track or short track.
The ISU President sees this as a throwback to the 1932 Lake Placid Olympics, where all four medal races for men and the demonstration races for women were skated in the so-called “North American pack style,” with mass starts. That was the only Olympics in which long track races were pack style.
(Cinquanta also wants to reduce the long track fields in the longest races – 10,000 for men, 5,000 for women – to 12 each.)
In addition to these two proposals, the ISU will ask the IOC to consider one from the Korean Skating Union that likely would expand the fields in ice dance and pairs by one entry each.
South Korea would like a 2018 entry in both disciplines, even though it never has had a pairs team qualify for the Olympics and has had just one ice dance entry, which finished last in 2002.
Cinquanta does not want to have South Korean teams replace one of those qualified in either event, so the IOC may have to increase the athlete quota to guarantee inclusion of the 2018 host country’s athletes.
