Berlin Marathon 2024: Olympic speed-skating champion Bart Swings eyes ninth inline skating title
Inline skating competitors take their place alongside the runners at the Berlin Marathon on Sunday 29 September, including a Winter Olympic champion.
It may seem that winter sports athletes emerge blinking into the sunlight just as the first flakes of snow appear, but some have been competing in plain sight during the summer sports season, too.
Take Belgium's Bart Swings.
The reigning men's speed skating mass start champion from the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 takes to the streets for the 2024 Berlin Marathon on Sunday (29 September) to wrest back the title he ceded to compatriot Jason Suttles at the 2023 edition.
It is an event Swings has won a record eight times.
Not by running, though.
In 1997, the Berlin Marathon introduced an inline skating competition alongside the running discipline.
The race quickly developed into the world's largest inline marathon, with more than 5,000 professional and leisure skaters taking to the streets of Germany's capital each year.
Swings first won the Berlin Marathon in 2013, the year before he competed at his first Winter Olympic Games at Sochi 2014, where his best-place finish was fourth in the 5,000m.
In the years leading up to the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, Swings won four more Berlin Marathons, consecutively, before claiming his first Olympic medal, a silver, in the men's mass start in the Republic of Korea.
Three more top spots have followed since then, including a course record of 56.45 minutes in 2022.
But in 2023, Swings was ousted by compatriot Suttles.
The pair crossed the line with exactly the same time of 57.01, but Swings fell back just enough to allow Suttles to take the tape, in an act of sportsmanship acknowledging his compatriot had done most of the leading work on the course.
The head-to-head might not be so genteel this time around with the prospect of a mouth-watering clash between the two Belgians, plus Patxi Peula of Spain, Italy's Matteo Barison, and the Suisse pair of Severin Widmer and Nicolas Iten, also vying to be podium toppers.
However, they'll have to go some way to beat Swings, who won both the 5,000m and 10,000m points races at the 2024 Inline Speed Skating World Championships in Pescara, Italy, the week before the Berlin Marathon.
Swings will be hoping for a ninth title as he builds toward the all-important winter sports season, which starts with the first World Cup of six, in Nagano, Japan between 22-24 November, and concludes with the 2025 ISU World Speed Skating Single Distances Championships in Hamar, Norway from 13-16 March.
Pretty quickly the next Winter Games will loom with Milano Cortina 2026 taking place between 6-22 February, the two-time men's speed-skating mass-start world champion looking to keep hold of his hard-fought Olympic title.
Bart Swings lives between two passions
Taking to the roads in the warmer months is perfect prep for Swings, with the metronomic nature of the sport in which speed and technique are key, almost meditative.
But being outside is a boon for a man whose winter months are spent on indoor ice circuits, performing lap after lap for endurance gains and to hone technique.
The change in temperature initially took some getting used to said Swings in an interview with Skating ISU in 2014, when he had already had a few seasons of winter speed-skating competitions on the ice, and summer inline-skating road races.
"They are two amazing sports, really hard sports," he said. "Both sports are physically really hard, and technically it's really important that you are good. There's also a difference of course with the winter and summer. For me, it was a big adjustment going from 30 degrees skating in Colombia to an ice rink in Astana (Kazakhstan) where it's -10 or something."
Also during that interview, Swings mentioned his thoughts ahead of his first Winter Olympic Games, which would take place in Sochi a few weeks after the interview.
"I want to go to the Olympics as I want to have as good as possible result. I'm not focusing on the podium or a top five or whatever, but I just want to be as quick as possible, and my best shape ever, and then we'll see what happens."
What happened was a fourth, fifth, tenth and 23rd places in the 5,000m, 10,000m, 1,500m, and 1,000m, respectively.
The silver four years later in the speed skating mass start at PyeongChang 2018 was Belgium's second-ever gold medal in Winter Olympics history and the first since 1948.
Two sixth places and an eighth place in the other three disciplines revealed a marked improvement from Swings first Winter Games, but he wanted more.
"I was going towards Beijing (2022) with the idea of 'I have everything to become an Olympic champion. I have the endurance, I have the speed, I have the strength', but I know also you cannot start a race like that and think, 'I have to win Olympic gold'. It was more like, I have to get a medal. I should be capable of that. And then we see how the race goes.
"Of course I raced to win," he laughed. "I did the whole race with the mindset that only gold matters, and eventually it turned out in a good way. I controlled the race perfectly and sprinted to the first spot. That was crazy."
Nerves are both good and bad, says Bart Swings
Despite all his success, which also includes 21 inline skating world titles, Swings still gets mighty nervous before every race, to the point, he says, that he wishes he'd never taken up the sport in the first place.
"In the past it was worse," he admitted in a video on his Instagram account weeks before the 2024 Berlin Marathon. "I had trouble sleeping. The hours before the race I actually don’t want the race to start. I just want to postpone everything. Hopefully it's raining and the track is wet and we have to wait. So I am very nervous.
"It's also necessary for me and it gets me on the edge, it gets me ready. I need the nerves to focus on everything and to be ready for the race. It's part of the game. It's not the most fun part of the game but I'm very nervous every time."
One of his team interjects: "I try to tell him always, imagine when you're nervous how the other guys knowing how good you are, and will be nervous skating with you.
"I think the other skaters will always be more nervous skating with him than he with the others."
Swings laughed. Nervously.
