Kristen Santos-Griswold missed out on an Olympic medal in the short track speed skating. The 31-year-old World Championship gold medalist tumbled her way to the semifinals, but she couldn’t sustain enough momentum to clinch the coveted podium at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics.
Although Santos-Griswold has been active for more than a decade, she had qualified for the Winter Olympics once prior — at Bejing in 2022.
All About the Crash Which Made Kristen Santos-Griswold Miss Out on Podium Finish
Everything was going well for Santos-Griswold in the women’s 500m short track speed-skating event until the quarterfinals. The 31-year-old had qualified with a top time of 42.767 seconds. Her teammate, Julie Letai, also qualified with a time of 43.275 seconds.
However, the quarterfinals had to be restarted a total of four times because one of the racers, China’s Chutong Zhang, had been disqualified for collisions and the other four racers struggled to get through the opening turns.
Despite the setback, Santos-Griswold clocked 42.174 seconds to storm into the semifinals. However, the collisions persisted and she underperformed in the semifinals, unable to make up for the lost time.
The 31-year-old clocked 45.364 seconds in the semifinals, and subsequently 1:08.444 after another collision in the non-medal finals to finish ninth overall.
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Santos-Griswold later explained what could’ve gone wrong in the semifinals. In her post-race interview, the speed skater opened up about the race:
“I know I’m fast, I know I can make moves. I was confident in getting off the [starting] line. I was like, I can fight for this, but then immediately we had some contact and it was just too big to recover from. That was really disappointing, that I didn’t even get a shot, but that’s part of sport.”
The World Championship gold medalist in the 1000m category further added:
“We’re all out there fighting to make it out of the rounds, fighting to get on the podium, to get on top of the podium, and I think that that’s something that’s a little bit different about the Olympics. It’s not like an accumulation of points, you’ve got one shot, and we’re all going to go out there and take it.”
Meanwhile, Dutch speed skater Xandra Velzeboer clocked a new world record of 41.399 seconds in the semifinals. She went on to clinch the gold medal, while defending champion Arianna Fontana of Italy clinched the silver medal and Canadian skater Courtney Sarault clinched the bronze medal.
