Chef de Mission Verheijen was hoping for a little more medals

“We have won many medals and received a beautiful gold one today,” said Verheijen about the victory of speed skater Irene Schouten on the mass start. “On the other hand, we just didn’t arrive at the predicted eighteen or nineteen medals. In terms of gold we may have one more than expected, but in terms of bronze we have left one or two.”

In the run-up to the Beijing Games, Verheijen stated the goal of winning “towards twenty medals”. The counter got stuck at seventeen: eight times gold, five times silver and four times bronze. At the previous Winter Games in Pyeongchang, TeamNL achieved 20 slices and in Sochi (2014) a record number of 24. The number of gold medals was the same compared to those three Games, eight each.

“We didn’t leave any gold where we should have gotten it”, continued Verheijen, who mainly saw things go ‘wrong’ on the way to the twenty places in long track speed skating and in short track with the men. On the long track, TeamNL won twelve medals, four less than in 2018 in South Korea.

In the short track, just like in the previous Games, four medals were won. But that was mainly thanks to Suzanne Schulting. Verheijen: “Shorttrack is a sport of falling, getting up and going again. Schulting crashed on the mixed relay, which was a chance for a medal for us. But she picked it up well and then became ‘Queen of the Games’. one of our two queens.”

With three times gold and one bronze, Irene Schouten was just a bit more successful than Schulting, who won two golds, one silver and one bronze. Together, the speed skater and short track speed skater were therefore good for almost half of the medals of the Orange team. Five of the seventeen slices were won by the men at TeamNL, the other medals were all by women.