Lorentzen and Takagi crowned grand World cup champions

The speed skating World cup season has come to an end in Minsk today.

By Jackob Savard

Photo: Schaats Foto’s

The distances on the program were 500m (2), 1500m, team sprint and mass start.

500m

On the ladies’ side of the competition, Angelina Golikova, Vanessa Herzog and Olga Fatkulina stepped on the podium. Herzog’s second place today was enough to win the World cup overall classification on the distance.

It was a Dutch domination in the men’s race as Jan Smeekens, Dai Dai Ntab and Hein Otterspeer finished first, second and third. Smeekens completed his race with a time of 34.83. Even if Havard Lorentzen didn’t have awesome results this weekend, he remained at the top of the 500m ranking and is the 2017-2018 500m World cup champion.

1500m

The new ladies’ allround world champion, Miho Takagi, won the 1500m event finishing ahead of Marrit Leenstra and Lotte Van Beek. With this race, Takagi confirms her overall World cup classification victory on 1500m.

Sverre Lunde Pedersen, who was almost crowned world allround champion last week, won the last 1500m race of the season. Denis Yuskov from Russia and the young Norwegian Allan Dahl Johansson completed the podium. Denis Yuskov is the overall World cup champion on the distance.

Team sprint

There was only three teams in the men’s and ladies’ team sprint. Russia won in the ladies’ competition and the Norwegian won in the men’s race.

Mass start

The mass start was raced at a pretty slow pace on the ladies' side but the intermediate sprint created some action. Ayano Sato from Japan was the fastest in the sprint and finished in front of Ivanie Blondin from Canada and Francesca Lollobrigida from Italy.

Only height skaters were on the line to skate the last mass start of the season. We still had a good show with Simon Schouten and Shota Nakamura’s breakaway. Schouten was finaly the fastest and claimed the victory. Nakamura finished second as Danila Smerikov from Russia finished third. Bart Swings from Belgium wins the overall mass start World cup classification.

Two new grand World cup champions were crowned

Havard Lorentzen and Miho Takagi were crowned grand world cup champions as they collected the most points in the cumulative of every distances this season. Lorentzen end his great season with 734 World cup points. Takagi is on top of the World cup classification with 1040 points and is almost 300 points in front of her closest rival.

All the results including the grand world champion classification are available HERE.

The speed skating season has now ended. What was your favorite moment of the season?