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Clear goal for Denny Morrison at upcoming World All-rounds

After satisfactory performances at the World Sprint Championships in Heerenveen and a gold and bronze medal at the World Cup in Hamar a week later, Denny Morrison is looking forward to skating the World All-round Championships in Berlin this weekend. During a short break from the World Cup circuit Morrison reflects on his performances in Hamar and Heerenveen and reveals what his goal will be for the upcoming World All-rounds.

By Jolanda Abbes

Denny Morrison can look back on some consistently good results over the last couple of weeks. At his first international competition of 2008, the World Sprint Championships in Heerenveen (January 19-20), he improved his personal best track record time in the 500m and skated to two fourth places in the 1000m. Like last year, he finished seventh overall. Morrison reflects: “I skated a very similar competition as I did last year. I started out a little slow, even for me, in the 500m and then crept back into the top 10 for a seventh place finish overall. It was pretty much what I had in mind for the competition, although I would have been more satisfied by standing on the podium at least once that weekend.”

The weekend after that, at the World Cup in Hamar, Morrison once again skated a new personal best track record time in the 500m (as well as in the 1000m and 1500m), won a bronze medal in the 1500m and raced to his first World Cup victory outside Canada in the 1000m. In this 1000m he beat Simon Kuipers by 0.01 seconds and fellow Canadian Jeremy Wotherspoon by 0.02 seconds. But despite the fact that Morrison is pleased with his World Cup victory as such, the race itself was far from perfect in his eyes: “Of course I am happy with my 1000m, but there are actually several negatives which I see in that race. When you compare my lap times from this competition to those from the World Sprints in Hamar in 2007, you would see that in this race I opened 0.3 faster than last year, had the same first lap, and a 0.1 slower last lap. So although my opener has improved, I think I am lacking in top end speed and that I should have been able to do an even faster last lap. In my 1500m at the World Cup in Hamar, for instance, my first two laps were 25.6 and 26.7. In my 1000m I did 25.2 and 26.6. So although I am very happy to have won, I also see several areas which can be improved upon in order to make me competitive with Shani Davis and a healthy Jeremy Wotherspoon.” Davis did not compete in Hamar and Wotherspoon had to deal with stomach pains that started during the Friday night of the World Cup and lasted all through Saturday.

For Morrison this was not only his first World Cup victory outside Canada, but it was also the first time he won a World Cup gold medal after skating in the last pair. Consequently, he instantly knew he had won: “I seem to have my best races when I am ranked in the middle of the pack and get to skate early and set the bar, rather than being last pair and trying to beat the other times. It’s hard not to watch what the other skaters' lap times are, and know what you have to do to win. For me, I knew my advantage was going to be in the last lap. During the race I was a little disappointed with my 25.2 first lap, but knew from my 1500m the day before that I would be able to make up lots of time in the last lap. I was thinking ‘hopefully I will make the podium’. There have been races in the past where I thought I had a great race, but never did as well as I had hoped for. I was pretty surprised when I crossed the line and saw a #1 beside my name! I was very pumped!”

After finishing fourth twice in the 1000m at the World Sprints and first in the same distance in Hamar a week later, one cannot help but wonder if Morrison feels that there is a substantial difference between his 1000m’s in Heerenveen and the one in Hamar: “It’s hard to say. I guess it just goes to show how competitive this group of skaters is. Jeremy was third in the 1000m one day at the World Sprints, then seventh the next. I tied for fourth both days, which is quite a coincidence. Lee winning the second 1000m in Heerenveen, but sixth in Hamar. There are dozens of examples. I'm happy to keep a pretty consistent top 5 finishing position, since Salt Lake City.”

Besides his gold medal in the 1000m, another thing worth noticing is Morrison’s improvement in the 500m. In Hamar, for example, he improved his personal best track record time by about 0.5 seconds: “My 500m races are coming along and I am becoming more consistent with the 9.9 second openers. I was very pleased with the 35.3 second 500m’s in Hamar, especially compared to doing two 35.8 second races there at the World Sprints last year. It's nice when improvements are made obvious like that sometimes.”

Before this season, Morrison was never able to open sub 10 seconds in the 500m. As a result, he was losing a lot of ground in the first 100m compared to the best sprinters in the world, and never managed to skate sub 35 seconds in this distance. And even though he might still not be able to compete with the fastest sprinters in the 500m as such, his more consistent openers of 9.9 seconds and a new personal best time of 34.85 skated last December in Calgary seem promising for the future. Moreover, an improved 500m combined with a strong 1000m and 1500m will increase his chances at the World Sprints as well as the World All-rounds. In his opinion, does Morrison feel that his improvement in the 500m is mostly due to his faster opener or does he see other reasons as well? “I think it’s mainly the opener. In fact, I've been struggling to find the most comfortable offset for my blades this season, and until Hamar I was never as comfortable in my corners as I was in the previous few seasons.”

Even though his opener has improved considerably, Morrison admits to the fact that this is not something that he has been working on specifically: “I haven't actually been working on the opener specifically at all. I've just been doing a lot more of them than what I usually do because of all the 500m’s and 1000m’s and sprint competitions I've been racing and preparing for.” Although a better opener would almost certainly have led to a better 500m, Morrison was forced to take it easy when it came to working on that area of the 500m because of an old injury: “Before I moved to Calgary, I had a lot of problems with my hip flexors, and they never quite healed properly from a soccer injury from when I was about 15. Because of that, I have always been tentative with doing a lot of practice starts, because I didn’t want to re-injure them. I would never do more than two roll-starts or standing starts, or a combination of each, in any one practice. Now that I've been taking care of my body quite a bit better, I realize doing more of these is possible, and I think next season I will put some more emphasis on my 500m. I may need to just to make the Canadian team in it!”

Besides his gold medal in the 1000m and his personal best track record time in the 500m, Morrison also won a bronze medal in the 1500m in Hamar. Still, more seemed to be in store when he entered the last lap and had a 0.7 second lead at the bell. He then lost a lot of speed and consequently only skated a 28.8 final lap. “It was going very well for me, but an unfortunate slip in the second last turn killed my momentum and destroyed my legs. It’s frustrating to be ahead by 0.7 with one lap to go and then lose by 0.08, but I guess the 1000m made up for that. Still, being that close to first after a mistake like that is great. I had several small mistakes like that last Fall and kept getting sixth and ninth place finishes, which were not nearly as close. That sort of realization makes me confident.”

So now, with a much improved 500m and a strong 1500m, Morrison is looking forward to skating the World All-round Championships in Berlin this weekend. Last year he finished tenth overall, but did manage to win two silver medals (in the 500m and 1500m) along the way. In terms of his goals for this competition, his feelings are conflicting: “It’s my goal to skate the10k again this year. Ugh. Not that I like the 10k, but because this would put me in the top 12 again! I think I should be able to do better than I did at the World All-rounds in Heerenveen last year, but same as the World Sprints, I’m not putting as much emphasis on these results as I am on the World Single Distances Championships at the end of the season.”

The World Single Distances Championships will take place in Nagano on March 6-9. As opposed to last year’s three day competition, this year the World All-rounds in Berlin will consist of two days or racing, on February 9-10.

Photo credits

Photo 1 and 2: DESGphoto/Lars Hagen

Photo 3: Erik Pasman, schaatsfoto's online

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