(Montreal) The head coach of the Canadian team Sébastien Cros drew a positive assessment of the first World Cup of short track speed skating, this weekend, at the Maurice-Richard arena, even if the representatives of the maple leaf had a worse harvest than at the same date last year.
Canadian skaters brought home five medals, including two in the relay, and the national team’s big guns were pretty quiet — excluding Steven Dubois’ silver in the second 1,000 meters of the weekend.
But for Cros, it is better to look at the work done than the trinkets collected at the start of the season.
“Individually, the results were a little disappointing, but in terms of the content of the races, overall, it was still not so bad,” he explained after Sunday’s races.
It is true that in individual distances, Félix Roussel and William Dandjinou achieved their best lifetime performances over 500m and 1000m. But among the women, Courtney Sarault, Florence Brunelle and others were not able to climb the podium, despite the absence of the three best skaters in the world: Suzanne Schulting, Kim Boutin and Min-jeong Choi.
“The little mistake, the little detail left and right, meant that on an individual level we could have done a little better,” said Cros. We will work on this and try to do better next weekend. »
The best female results were fourth places from Sarault (1000m) and Rikki Doak (500m).
“It shows the depth we have among the guys in any case. Among the girls we are lacking a little bit, but it will come. It’s certain that they [Roussel and Dandjinou] really have the full range that a short track athlete can have: physical, tactical and technical. They have the audacity; they try things. It’s interesting. We saw it with William, who was second at the end. He could have stayed there, but he tried to win. It’s good to have athletes trying things like that. »
Blais occupied this role for the women. She tried the experiment last year, with less success.
“That doesn’t mean that the teams and orders won’t change: we want to develop a broader pool of athletes who can take all positions in the relay. The idea is to get them used to working in different ways together so that in competitions there are no surprises,” added Cros.
The good news, despite these mixed results, is that the Canadian team will not brood for long: a second World Cup will be presented on Friday at the same place.
“We’re going to sit down and watch the races to see what aspects we need to work on,” Cros said. Hopefully this will be fixed next week. But there’s not that much to change.
“There are the results, and there is what we see,” he continued. When what we see is still good, we can expect the results to come later. When what we see is not good, even when we have good results, then we understand that something is missing. There, everything we worked on in training, we see that it is close, that it lacks a little refinement.
“And it’s the first [World Cup]. They are not there to be at the top. We are still in a state of mind where all the competitions we do, we want to be good. […] And I see that some of our athletes are not yet at 100% [of their potential],” Cros concluded.