Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mercury]

Get this, Jeremy Wotherspoon breaks the WORLD RECORD, never even gets his named mentioned on Yonhap News. I had to dig to find the link.

Anyways Wotherspoon has had a great career, and he is 31, way to go.

check out the slide show........


http://www.cbc.ca/sports/amateur/story/2007/11/09/wotherspoon-worldrecord.html

S. Korean speed skater wins silver medal in world championships By Nam Kwang-sik
SEOUL, Nov. 10 (Yonhap) -- South Korean speed skater Lee Kang-seok grabbed a silver medal in the world championships held in Salt Lake City, United States, Saturday, the Korea Skating Union said.

Lee, 23, skated the 500-meter course in 34.20 seconds in the male event in the Essent ISU Speed Skating World Cup 2007-2008. Lee shaved 0.05 of a second off his previous world record set in March.





World record for Canadian speedskater Wotherspoon
Last Updated: Friday, November 9, 2007 | 9:16 PM ET
CBC Sports
Canadian speedskater Jeremy Wotherspoon has broken the world record in the 500 metres.

The 31-year-old native of Red Deer, Alta., set the new mark of 34.03 seconds in capturing the opening World Cup race of the season at the Olympic Oval in Kearns, Utah.

Canada's Jeremy Wotherspoon skates to a new world record in the 500-metre race at a World Cup speedskating event in Kearns, Utah. It was the 58th victory of his career.
(Douglas C. Pizac/Associated Press) "It feels really good to get going like this right off the bat," said Wotherspoon. "It's hard to pinpoint exactly the key areas of my race. You sort of have to have everything in the race go pretty well.

"What I was most focused on was entering my turns a little better and getting off the start line really well and I did that well today."

Wotherspoon, a three-time Olympian, surpassed the previous mark of 34.25 set by South Korea's Kang-Seok Lee on March 9, 2006, at the same venue.

Lee took the silver in Friday's race in 34.20, while South Korea's Kyou-Hyuk Lee was third in 34.31

[DRAMA OVERKILL]

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So what?

[DRAMA OVERKILL]

[mercury]

[mercury]

The guy is amazing, an inspiration to all.


CALGARY � A season away from competition and a few weeks spent sprawled on the deck of a fishing boat near Norway hasn't made speedskater Jeremy Wotherspoon slower.

Wotherspoon skated his fastest 500 metres in four years and lowered his own Canadian record en route to victory Friday at the Olympic Oval Invitational.

"It's nice to get a personal best time after four years," the former world champion said.

The Invitational, which qualifies Canada's speedskaters for this season's World Cup team, is Wotherspoon's first competition in over a year and a half.







Wotherspoon turned 31 on Friday. He may be a 12-year veteran of the national team, but the tall, lanky skater from Red Deer, Alta., still had to qualify for the squad after taking last season off from racing.

He'll compete in the 500 and 1,000 metres on the World Cup circuit, which opens Nov. 9-11 in Salt Lake City, followed by the Canadian stop at the Oval from Nov. 16 to 17.

"The times that we're doing now, they get sent out and people know, so it'll be interesting," Wotherspoon said. "No matter how well I've been skating, I never expect the rest of the world to be behind me."

Denny Morrison of Fort St. John, B.C., won the men's 1,500 metres Friday after taking the 1,000 the previous day.

Christine Nesbitt of London, Ont., was quickest in both the women's 500 and 1,500 metres. Winnipeg's Cindy Klassen, winner of five Olympic medals at the 2006 Games, was runner-up to Nesbitt in the 1,500.

With 57 victories, Wotherspoon has won more men's World Cup races than anyone else in the world.

A silver medal in 1998 was his best Olympic result, however, as he suffered a disastrous fall in his opening steps of the 500 metres in 2002 and was ninth four years later in Turin, Italy.

Wotherspoon didn't know if he wanted to continue speedskating until the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, so he took a hiatus from racing to think about it.

"I would say, right now, Vancouver is my goal and it's not a year-to-year decision," he said. "That was one of the big reasons I took a year off, so I'd have time to think about if I wanted to continue, or if I wanted to call it (quits).

"That time gave me the opportunity to think about it. I knew when I got back that I was ready to train and build towards the Olympics in Vancouver."

An avid fisherman, Wotherspoon took advantage of his sabbatical to appear on the fishing show Fins and Skins, and also to spend a few weeks on a Norwegian cod-fishing boat.

Canadian national team director Finn Halvorsen, who is Norwegian, helped arrange Wotherspoon's trip to the winter fishing grounds of the Norwegian Sea.

"I learned that I'm probably not cut out to be a fisherman on the Norwegian Sea because I'd probably lose a lot of weight," Wotherspoon said. "It was pretty rough. If I laid down I felt OK.

"Basically I would try and get by until I threw up and then I would lay down and get through the rest of it.

"Fly fishing is more my thing. You're not getting bounced around in a boat and dredging the nets up from the bottom of the sea. It was an interesting experience though."

Wotherspoon kept himself in shape between fishing trips and enlisted the help of Bobsleigh Canada strength coach Stu McMcMillan to help him address back problems created by the imbalance of strength between his upper and lower body.

"I did some other training that was geared at full-body training, not really specific to skating," Wotherspoon explained. "It gave me some new ideas of things I needed to do to maintain my body in a more balanced way, which has helped me skate better this year."

His main fear about a return to racing was going back to the same old routine he'd followed for over a decade.

Speed Skating Canada's hiring of American Michael Crowe in May to coach the men's sprint team has freshened practice for Wotherspoon as the emphasis is on perfecting technique, than skating just hard.

"The focus is to make sure we're never sacrificing our technique," Wotherspoon explained. "The more you focus on that in training, the more natural it comes to you and the more natural to think about it while you're racing, instead of just trying to go fast."

Crowe says that's a philosophy he followed coaching Bonnie Blair of the U.S. when she raced against the East German women in the 1990s.

"We weren't going to be as powerful with those East German women, but if she worked on skating, she could definitely skate better than them," Crowe explained. "I think technique wins."

Wotherspoon doesn't regret not racing last season and says he's better mentally and physically for the break.

"It felt good to take a year off last year and now it feels good to be back, so I think that's a good thing, that I'm always happy with what I'm doing," he said.

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