How to watch long track speed skating at the Winter Olympics: A guide to understanding and appreciating the sport

The 2018 Olympics in Pyeongchang will be the 24th Winter Olympics to have speedskating as part of the program. One of the games’ most storied sports, speedskating has been in the Olympics from the very beginning, first appearing in the inaugural Winter Games in 1924 in France. It’s long been a strong sport for American athletes, though it’s competitive.

The United States has won 67 medals in long track speedskating, more than any country except the Netherlands, which is also the only country with more golds (35 to 29). The Dutch were the dominant nation in speedskating at the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia, where the United States missed out on the speedskating medal stand altogether.

The majority of Olympic speedskating events are considered “long track,” where there’s more straight-ahead sprinting and fewer turns. Long track races happen on a 400-meter track, compared to just more than 100 meters on a short track. It’s not strictly a commentary on the length of the races, though long track races trend toward longer distances.

Speedskating goes on throughout the games. The first event is the women’s 3,000m, at 6 a.m. ET on Feb. 10. There’s long track racing until the men’s and women’s mass starts, both new events, on Feb. 24. NBC networks will carry the games, with streaming available here. You can also live stream NBC, NBCSN, and the Olympic Channel coverage via Fubo.TV on your computer or mobile devices.

It’s one of the fastest sports in the world, but it’s also a significant endurance test. In a sense, it’s a hybrid between sprinting and distance running, with some ice hockey and figure skating mixed in. Plus, it’s only really in the spotlight for a few days every four years.

A bunch of skaters race around a 400m track as many times as it takes to reach the race’s full distance. They go in lanes. The speedskating race lengths at the games are 500m, 1000m, 1500m, 3000m, and 5000m. A cool thing about the Olympic program is that qualifying is fully sorted out by the time the games come around, so medal rounds commence on the first day.

The weirdest rule is more a lack of a rule. Players aren’t required to wear hard helmets, which has always seemed dangerous to me given the speed at which they’re traveling. There’s another one, which is that skaters can restart if they’re impeded by an obstacle and take the best time of their two races, but dirty ice doesn’t count as an obstacle. Also, if a player slips and slides over the finish line, his or her run isn’t complete until the front skate crosses the finish line, whether that’s the first thing to cross or not.

Find out what country that person’s from (if you don’t already know), then holler during every race about how that country’s rival had a skater out of their lane get in the way of someone else and deserved to be disqualified. It doesn’t matter if that’s actually true.

Get yourself a nice Apolo Ohno full-body compression suit, even though he was a short-tracker.

Seven bald eagles out of 10.

Mario Kart!