Until now, the lost 1974 World Cup final in soccer (lost to West-Germany - the Rival Next Door) with "the best team ever" (including the legendary Johan Cruijff) and a Ducth goal in the first minute was a National Trauma. There are still people who say "1974 never happened". And that's really funny when you're not that into soccer like me.

But yesterday, the National Trauma was replaced with a new one. Books will be written about this moment. There will be talk for days in the street. Reruns will be shown on television for years.

The event? The 10 km speed skating on the Olympics (in the words of an American commentator several years ago "watching grass grow", with races lasting 13 minutes and up). In the Netherlands skating is a big thing and the 10k is The Big Thing, with lots of Dutch gold medals in world cups, olypmpics and European/World championships. The Dutch practically dominated the distance in the 90's, but I for one welcome the other names and nationalities that finally made it in a real race in recent years.
The gold medal we "couldn't lose" (Sven Kramer has won nearly everything on this distance in the last few years) was lost. Disqualified. Due to one mistake: he did not change lanes when he was supposed to halfway through the race. And who was to blame? His coach...

Poor guy.

It was really unsettling to see reruns this morning from different perspectives. Officials, when it dawned on them. His coach who realised his mistake ten seconds later. The audience. Sven's father and mother. His girlfriend (who's a gold medallist in her own right with field hockey). The Korean who was in first place at that time and realised he had won a gold medal, even though hw only stepped on the 400m track for the first time in October last year (the Koreans didn't allow him to go to Vancouver as he wasn't qualified for the short track team, so he switched to the longer track just so he could go). The Dutch Bronze medallist, who fully realised what had happened and what would be the reaction back home.

There is already talk -mind you this is less than 12 hours ago and the Netherlands was in deep, if not restful sleep- the coach led him be diskwalified because of sponsorship deals: Kramer's sponsor has offered a EUR 50 discount for every gold medal for each costumer, which runsin the several millions for each race won...