After the grading they sat for a few moments on the dark blue upholstered bench in front of the light blue wall with the five rings. This well-lit area in figure skating is called the “Kiss and Cry” corner and all eyes in the hall are on it after a freestyle. But even for these extreme emotions, they were too exhausted. Minerva Hase laid her head on Nolan Seegert’s shoulder for a while; the trainer softly spoke comforting words. Then they got up and left. Olympia – first a dream, then a nightmare – was over.
Your rating was irrelevant that evening. 149.69 points are out of the question for the experienced pair runners Hase/Seegert and say nothing about the technical and stylistic ability of this duo; the numbers only give an indication of how mercilessly a ten-day quarantine in Beijing had drained Nolan Seegert; how much strength, energy, resilience and reserves the isolation in a small single room deprived him of. “At some point it won’t go any further,” he said, “no matter how you try to get the coordination under control.”
The four minutes of the freestyle in quick succession: a difficult throw, the twist, at the start, then instead of a jump combination, a single jump, a fall during the triple throw rittberger, an aborted lift, in which a powerless seegert had to put the partner back on the runners to be on the safe side. “It was hard!” Minerva Hase sighed later. She had had to train alone on the ice for ten days during Seegert’s absence, and because she was considered a Covid contact person, she even had to distance herself from the figure skating team when eating.
Minerva Rabbit is floating in the air, Nolan Seegert gets her ready to catch her. He later has to stop lifting because he lacks strength.
(Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP)
Arriving early, Seegert, 29, was the first athlete on the German Olympic team to go through the coercive measures that the so-called playbook of the organizing committee (Bocog) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ordered at these games in the event of a positive corona test after the charge in Beijing . “We knew what to expect, but of course we didn’t know that figure skaters would be affected,” said the sports director of the DEU association, Claudia Pfeifer. From then on, she tried to work with the umbrella organization DOSB to improve the isolation conditions, which the chief de mission, Dirk Schimmelpfennig, called “unreasonable” in an official protest note. Seegert’s room was small, the hygiene questionable, the food inadequate, initially there was no stable internet connection to communicate with the world outside of his quarantine hotel, which nobody was allowed to visit, not even the team doctors. In order to keep fit for the Olympic competition, top-level sport only had one utensil available: a “mat on a very small area,” he said, “on which I did everything that you can do on a mat: sit-ups, burpees, push-ups, Jumping jacks as a fitness program”.
The DOSB managed to organize a new room for him, along with an ergometer, which was delivered after a week, but Seegert didn’t use this either because he was “stringently rejected,” as he said. His daily PCR tests showed fluctuating CT values, the quarantine doctors would have suspected a causal connection between cycling and viral load, the German doctors ruled this out. “But since I didn’t want to mess with the hotel staff every day, I didn’t do it.”
At Seegert “the battery was empty”
Pair skating is an extremely artistic, exhausting discipline with complicated throws and triple jumps, as well as lifts where the partner has to let the partner rotate on their hands above their head, all in motion, to the beat of the music and on narrow runners. After four minutes, the runners come off the ice, panting from the exertion. “Everyone experiences it differently,” says Seegert, “sometimes you have heavy legs afterwards, sometimes you can’t breathe, sometimes you lose coordination, and if you get really bad, then the man with the hammer comes.” And these are just hardships on normal days. On Saturday, in the Olympic Freestyle, he felt a mix of everything.
Seegert/Hase are the best German duo, in the winter before the pandemic they took third place at the Grand Prix in Russia and finished fifth at the European Championships. It was only this year that Minerva Hase was able to train fully again after suffering a serious foot injury. In the summer they left the long-time Berlin coach Romy Oesterreich to get the finishing touches in Russia, in Sochi, with Dimitri Savin, who had previously also sporadically looked after them in the Berlin Sportforum. The scope of training includes twice an hour on the ice, each including a 45-minute warm-up program, plus athletics, rowing or another fitness program several times a week. None of that was possible in Beijing. After Seegert’s release from isolation a week ago, they did not complete the freestyle to save all their strength for the competition. It wasn’t enough, they fought to the end, then, as Seegert said, “the battery was empty”.
The freestyle was won by the Chinese Sui Wenjing and Han Cong on Saturday, who crowned their long career with the Olympic victory and 239.25 points; four years ago in Pyeongchang, when Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot enchanted the ice art world, they were second. Silver went to Yevgeniya Tarasova/Vladimir Morozow from Russia, bronze to the Russian world champions Anastassija Mishina/Alexander Galljamov. Minerva Hase and Nolan Seegert took the final place in the classification. You want to let a few days pass and then try to evaluate what happened. What they showed the world: How much strength it takes to endure a four-minute pair freestyle.