Speed Skating at the 1968 Winter Olympics

The 1968 speed skating events were held at the Speed Rink, built at the Parc Paul Mistral specifically for the Grenoble Winter Olympics. The rink was outdoors but was built with artificial ice. Since the 1968 Winter Olympics, six other major tournaments have been conducted there, beginning with the 1969 Women’s World Championships. But the last two tournaments were the 1981 World Sprints and the 1979 World Juniors and it has not been used internationally since, although a few national events were contested there in the early 1990s.

There was no dominant skater in 1968, as there often is at a Winter Olympics, such as 1964, when Lidiya Skoblikova won all four women’s gold medals, or in 1972, when Ard Schenk would win three of the four men’s gold medals. Both Skoblikova and Schenk were in Grenoble competing, but Skoblikova was past her prime, and Schenk had not yet reached his.