Netherlands' Knegt takes silver in 1500m short-track skating
Sjinkie Knegt secured second place in the 1,500-meter short-track speed skating event on Saturday, winning the Netherlands a silver medal. South Korean Hyojun Lim set an Olympic Record of 2:10.485 in his gold medal performance, beating Knegt by seven hundredths of a second.
There were seven skaters still in the race on the last lap, and the crowd in Korea was cheering very loudly as the skaters neared the finish. Knegt patted Lim on the back and his helmet in congratulations, before pumping his own fist in the air. Knegt did shake his head a bit looking at the replay board above, but was all smiles when he was congratulated on the podium.
The silver is only the second medal for the Netherlands in a short-track event. Knegt won the country's first when he took bronze in the 1,000-meter event at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.
The 28-year-old Dutch man, from Bantega, Friesland is the world record holder for the event, after a blistering 2016 skate in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Semen Elistratov, a Russian athlete competing under the Olympic flag, took bronze finishing .132 seconds behind Knegt. Elistratov was cleared of a doping ban in March 2016 after testing positive for meldonium. Although the drug was banned at the start of the year, but Elistratov was cleared as the World Anti-Doping Agency was uncertain how long the drug remains in the body making it difficult to determine if he took the drug before or after it was forbidden.
