Roar Grønvold

Roar Grønvold
nation	Norway
birthday	March 19, 1946
place of birth	Hvittingfoss
size	186 cm
Weight	80 kg
job	Physiotherapist
Career
Pers. Best times	500 m - 39.3 sec. 1000 m - 1: 21.32 min. 1500 m - 2: 01.45 min. 5000 m - 7: 22.5 min. 10,000 m - 15: 19.98 min.
status	resigned
Medal table
Olympic medals 0 × 2 × 0 × MK World Championship medals 0 × 1 × 0 × EM medals 0 × 1 × 0 ×
winter Olympics silver Sapporo 1972 5000 m silver Sapporo 1972 1500 m  All around world championships silver Oslo 1972 Great four-way battle  All-around European Championships silver Davos 1972 sprint

Roar Grønvold (born March 19, 1946 in Hvittingfoss ) is a former Norwegian speed skater . In 1972 he won two Olympic silver medals and in the same year he was runner-up in the world and European championship in the all-around competition.

career

Grønvold already competed successfully in speed skating as a junior and became Norwegian all-round champion in his age group in 1964. Despite several appearances in international competitions and other international competitions, his breakthrough did not succeed at first: At the Olympic Winter Games , he finished the race over 500 meters in 13th place. In the Norwegian team around Per Ivar Moe and his role model Fred Anton Maier , he was initially in the second row; his first podium result in a national championship he achieved with second place in 1970, which he defended in 1971. Both times he was beaten by Dag Fornæss .

The most successful season in Grønvold's career was the winter of 1971/72. In January 1972 he beat Fornæss on three of four routes at the Norwegian Championships and thus secured the national title in the all-around for the first time. In the same month he only had to admit defeat to the Dutch Ard Schenk at the European Championships . At the Olympic competitions , only Schenk prevented Grønvold from winning again: the Norwegian won the silver medal behind Schenk both on the 1,500 meter course and over the 5,000 meters. This result was repeated at the third major event of the winter, the All-Around World Championships in Oslo, where Grønvold ran the fastest time over 500 meters (at the same time as Schenk), but was clearly behind the Dutchman on all three other distances. Grønvold thus ended the season with a total of four silver medals. He recognized Schenk's superiority and declared after the Olympic Games: "This Schenk would have won even on sandpaper."

In August 1972, Grønvold - like almost the closed world elite of speed skating, including all still active Olympic champions - switched to the newly founded International Speed ​​Skating League (ISSL), a well-paid professional league in which the previous amateurs earned money for their appearances in world cups. Grønvold also won medals here at the professional world and European championships, which were announced as part of the ISSL, but were not recognized as such by the world association ISU . Due to the amateur paragraph, Grønvold and the other ISSL starters were no longer allowed to compete in the title competitions and the Olympic Games organized by the ISU. The bankruptcy of the professional league in the winter of 1974, among other things due to the low number of spectators, was the end of Grønvold's international speed skating career.

After the end of his career, Grønvold was the coach of the Norwegian junior speed skating team as well as some lower-class football teams.

Web links

Commons : Roar Grønvold  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Roar Grønvold in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Statistics at speed skating news

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Terje Wilhelmsen: Roar Grønvold: - Hjertes mitt gråter on tb.no. Released June 10, 2015. Accessed March 28, 2020.
2. ↑ OS moment: Give heerst in Sapporo on schaatsen.nl. Released January 26, 2014. Accessed March 28, 2020.