Daniel Greig Interview
As we inch closer and closer to Beijing it's a perfect time to tick off another sport on the show that we have never covered before in Speed Skating as we chat with two-time Australian speed skater Daniel Greig about his amazing career and experiences in the sport! We find out more from Daniel just how he transitioned from roller sports into ice sports and how difficult that transition was as an Australian in a sport in which there are no full sized facilities anywhere the country. We also find out just how it is impossible to ever skip leg day in speed skating and just how grueling of a sport it is to compete in. Added to this we learn more about just how his devastation at his first Olympics actually helped him further in life and how he could technically be classed as an Olympic silver medallist in an unofficial Olympic event. It's a great chat that you will want to hear so make sure you don't miss out!
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Please note this is an automated transcript that may contain errors.
BEN WATERWORTH: It is Off The Podium, An Olympics Podcast coming to you today for a pretty exciting episode. You know we like to tick off the sports in terms of the Olympic sports and the Olympians that we chat to. And we always get excited when we talk to a new sport, an athlete from a new sport I should say. And today we're doing that in what is now the penultimate sport that we haven't talked about when it comes to the Winter Olympics, Long Track Speed Skating. Can you believe we've never had a Long Track Speed Skater on this show? And we are speaking today with Daniel Greig, an Australian two-time Olympian in the sport of Long Track Speed Skating. And a fascinating story that Daniel has to tell about his Olympic journey, how he transitioned into the sport after being quite a handy inline skater. And after a couple of near misses about the sport being included in the Summer Olympics, decided to switch focus across over to the Winter Olympics and try his hand at Long Track Speed Skating. Now, for people outside of Australia, maybe our Canadian listeners or European listeners, who Long Track Speed Skating is a bit more of a prominent sport. The sport of Long Track Speed Skating isn't really a sport you can do pretty easily in Australia because we have no facilities in Australia for Long Track Speed Skating. Have to, of course, resort to the much smaller rings, hence why maybe we've produced a few more successful short track speed skaters in this country. But as you will learn in this interview, Australia has a very storied history in the sport of Long Track Speed Skating, believe it or not. Until 1994, our best ever Olympic result at the Winter Olympics was in the sport of Long Track Speed Skating. And you'll hear just exactly when and who that was with in this interview. And Daniel goes over just the hurdles he had to overcome in the sport, narrowly missing out on a worst Olympics back in Vancouver by just the tiniest of margins, and then his experiences in Sochi and Pyeongchang. And quite fascinating to learn about his experiences in Sochi in particular because he actually was a genuine medal chance going in to the Sochi Olympics, and something happened to him during those games which prevented him to a very honest, open experience about how he dealt with that. And just a fascinating chat here with Daniel and learning more about his Olympic experiences. You're going to enjoy this one. This is our chat with two-time Olympic speed skater, Daniel Greig.
BEN WATERWORTH: I am so excited to talk to our next guest here on the show today, because we are ticking off the penultimate winter sport on the Winter Olympics program of an athlete we've never spoken to before. We're speaking to somebody today from the sport of long track speed skating, an Australian two-time Olympian from Sochi and Pyeongchang. And I am so fascinated to learn more about this sport and his journey in it. It's a pleasure to welcome to the program, Daniel Greig. Daniel, first of all, welcome to Off The Podium. It's a pleasure to speak with you today.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, no, thanks a lot, Ben. It's nice to talk to someone else too. And before we got on here, it was nice to hear about how you're such a passionate Olympic nerd, like myself.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, we're the best type, right? Like that's kind of, you know, we need to be advertised a little bit more out there that these passionate Olympic nerds should be, you know, a thing, we should be our own Olympic sport. Come on.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, I think people don't realise that the Olympics is inherently a lot more nerdy than people realise.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yes, when all of a sudden you want to talk about the 1920 Antwerp Olympics, you know that that might be slightly nerdy. So, you know, that could be a topic of conversation, special episode. One thing I wanted to add though, and I'm sure you never get this at all, Daniel, is we're a co-Canadian Australian show. I was mentioning this to you off air, and our co-host on this show, Colin, he joins me on another spin-off show. We do a James Bond podcast. And when we're talking about Daniel Greig, he likes to say Daniel Craig in his lovely accent. And when I literally am researching you for this interview and Googling you, and I type in Daniel Greig, what does it also come up with? Daniel Craig. Do you often get confused for the six James Bond out there at all, Daniel?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, no, absolutely, that happens is, and most of the time, while booking hotels, I'll be booking hotels and I'll have booked my hotel, and then I'll get a call from the hotel concierge staff because they've mistakenly thought that I am Daniel Craig, the James Bond actor, and they're calling me up and asking if I need special concierge services. As much as I very much love to take them off on that offer, I have to disappoint them at that time. And so I'm sorry. I'm just Daniel Greig, the Australian Olympian. And then they hang up the phone.
BEN WATERWORTH: So you need to play up to that. You should just be like, absolutely. I expect my usual tailor up here at seven. I want some Bollinger. You know, like this is where you play up to that. Come on, after all these years, you should be making the most of it.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, I think probably in the countries where they might not have necessarily seen him all that much on TV, I could probably take advantage of that. I could just turn up and say, oh, yeah, I'm not sorry. I'm not quite as tall as I look on TV. Maybe a little bit more tan, but yeah, I'm him.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yep, absolutely. I will gladly sign your James Bond book, 100%. But I love any form of speed skating. And I think obviously for most Australians, we think speed skating, we're thinking short track, we're thinking Bradbury, we're thinking all that kind of things. But when it comes to long track, Australia has a bit more of a deeper history in the sport than I think a lot of Australians actually realise. How do you get into long track? Give us your sort of journey into how you pick up this fantastic sport.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, okay. So I started off, my first contact with any kind of speed skating was rollerblading. My dad gave me a pair of rollerblades, literally the rollerblade brand, when I was five or six years old, and he genuinely just wanted to get me out of the house, I'm pretty sure. Because as almost every Olympian will say, they got into sport because their parents realised they had a kid with way too much energy and they just needed them out of the house.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's the perfect journey for every Olympian, 100%.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, it seems to be one of the more common ones. And in Australia, I got into inline speed skating. So that's essentially ice speed skating, but just with wheels on the bottom of your feet instead of a blade. And I got involved, we have in Australia, we have a national circuit and a national championships. And at a very young age, I got offered to go to the national championships for Australia. That was probably when I was 13. I was skating out of a little inline skating club in Melbourne in a suburb called Eltham, which back then was called the Eltham Speed Skating Club, but I believe now it's called Skaters with a Z, skaters club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I went and I represented Victoria at the time, and I brought home a couple of medals. And then I think maybe three years later, when I was 15, they felt I was of a high enough level that they offered me a position on the world championship team. And that was my first world championship experience was in 2006, Skate Australia sent me to Korea, South Korea. And in my first event, I believe it was the 1000 metres, which is an event I also contest on ice these days. I got ninth, and all of a sudden, a whole new world opened up for me as I thought, oh shit, I might be quite good at something. And back then I was a typical little shit. I didn't really take any of my coaches seriously. I barely turned up to training. And then I got approached by, I think one of the parents from the club, and not my own parents, but another parent who sort of said to me, oh, maybe if you dedicated yourself, you could really be something in this. I thought, oh yeah, maybe that's true. So I chatted to my own parents, and we found at that time someone who was considered to be the best inline speed skating coach in Australia. Her name is Desley Hill. And she wasn't actually in Australia at that time. She was coaching inline skating teams in Europe, where there's quite a much bigger circuit for that. But she was willing to give some advice at a distance. So she was writing a training program for me at a distance, and she had one of her friends, who was also an ex-speed skater, come out and coach me. Actually, not just one of her friends. I think there was two or three of them that would come out and give advice. And so she was running my programs at a distance, and her friend was turning up and coaching me. And when I say turning up and coaching me, we didn't have any world championship level venues for inline speed skating in Melbourne at the time. So we were skating on car parks, literally. So we were just turning up at shopping centre car parks and rolling around with our roller blades on, and then every now and then, security would come and chase us out.
BEN WATERWORTH: They could catch you though, right? Come on, you're not in the world.
DANIEL GREIG: That's right. Exactly. They could never catch me. And I think as a teenager, that was kind of an element that was attractive to me as I was almost doing something that wasn't allowed. I think that made it exciting for me. So I did that. And then next year, I came back to a world championship, a junior world championships, and I was junior world champion. Completely out of nowhere. Didn't expect it. I had no idea what was coming, but I was junior world champion in the sprint distances, and I thought, holy crap, what now? So I kept on training, and at about that time, I was also completing VCE in Melbourne. I believe they've called it something else, but that's the last two years of high school where you have to get a really high score in order to get into all the university courses that you want. So I kept training, and I missed, I think, about, I think I only attended about 66% of my last year of high school.
BEN WATERWORTH: As you missed in year 2012, it's not important, right?
DANIEL GREIG: Exactly, but I had a good reason. I had a good reason. And then I went to junior world championships again. That was my final year competing as a junior, and I was for the second year in a row junior world champion, which was awesome. I thought at that time I was starting to get pretty big ego. And I thought, oh, wow, yeah, I'm really, I'm so good at this. But at that time, there was also something else that was going on. And quite visibly within the sport of inline speed skating, it was getting considered for a summer Olympics position. And I believe at the time it was between inline speed skating and rugby to be added to the summer Olympics program as a test event. And at that World Championships, the IOC was present, the committee. And a couple of weeks after that World Championships, which was in Spain, this was 2008, they released a decision that inline speed skating would not be added to the Olympic program. So the last couple of years, people were sort of saying things like, maybe you'll hit the senior ranks just at the time that inline speed skating becomes an Olympic sport. And then all of a sudden, it was just not possible, at least for an Olympic cycle, just not going to be possible. But that wasn't the end of the road. So there were quite a lot of speed skaters in attendance at that World Championships from the Netherlands, which is a sport in which inline speed skating and ice speed skating are kind of interchangeable. They happen concurrently. It's just speed skating is something that happens year round, but it's seasonal. So in the summer, they skate on wheels. In the winter, they skate on ice. And the attitude from the Dutch was very much, well, just go do ice speed skating, because to them that was sort of the natural, okay, if you can't go to the Olympics with wheels on your feet, go to the Olympics with a blade on your foot. So that idea that was planted in my head and I chatted to my dad about it. My dad said, yeah, well, why not? Maybe give it a shot. And my dad very generously offered to pay for a week trip for me and him to just go to the Netherlands and try ice speed skating and see how it was. So I think it was four or five months later, yeah, for the very first time I flew to Europe, not to go on a holiday, but to go to an ice skating rink in a city in the north of the Netherlands and yeah, have a shot at ice skating. So very grateful to my dad that he used his savings at the time and his holidays to take me to, yeah, I guess quite a small cold ice skating rink so that I could just skate around like a little brat. And my attitude or the outcome of that was that I came back to Australia and I said, oh, ice skating sucks. I hated the cold. I hated the weather in the Netherlands. I hated everything about it at that time. I think because I was used to when I do sport, I was skating out in the sunshine, the beautiful weather in Australia. And when I went to competitions, I was also going to nice, warm countries. And I was very much a sun child, I suppose, you would say. And that really, really didn't suit me. So that was my first experience with long track speed skating. And it wasn't until that idea of that was my shot at going to the Olympics. It wasn't until about six months later when that idea that that burned a hole in my skull. And I just went, you know what? Screw it, I'm going to try it anyway.
BEN WATERWORTH: Is it something that when it comes to the role of sports, and you're mentioning kind of obviously in a place like the Netherlands, where speed skating is basically a national sport almost, that that's that common? And is there much of a, and I'm sure you'll talk about kind of the transition across into ice, but is it something that you could just quickly pick up? And like when you had those first experience on the ice in the Netherlands that you find, you said, well, this isn't all that different. It's blades instead of wheels, same techniques, things like that, or is there a little bit more to it than that?
DANIEL GREIG: There is and there isn't. So actually inline skating was invented to be a summer training method for ice skating, because ice skating is a much older sport. I think you'll know from the history of the Winter Olympics, it's one of the oldest events from the Winter Olympics, long track speed skating. And it wasn't until about 1970s or 1980s when someone, I believe it was actually also in the Netherlands, someone thought, well, if we want to train in the summer, why don't we just make a blade that has wheels on it and then go skating out on the road? And I might have my history of skating companies a little bit wrong here, but I believe that was the roller blade company. So if you think about the name roller blade, and that was the first time that was invented. And then, so these roller blades, they existed for quite a long time before they began to take off within a sport, because up until, I think it was 1989 or 1991, when people did skating races, they still used roller skates with like trucks and wheels arranged in a square. And then all of a sudden people started turning up to these races with roller blades on and like completely kicking their asses, just going so much faster. And then that caused the sort of a revolution within that sport. And at the same time, it was a revolution in the way that people were thinking about skating as being a completely separate sport from ice skating. All of a sudden, they were a lot closer together in how you did it. And then from all the way through the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a history of skating, really great skating athletes transitioning to ice skating, and then all of a sudden just dominating the ice skating sport out of nowhere. Because they came from a completely separate training background that was a lot more focused on aerobic fitness, where the attitude to ice skating until that point was that it was just a power sport. And so a lot of these inline skating trained athletes just came out and dominated. And there was one that was very much in the forefront of my mind when I was thinking whether I was going to try and make the transition. There was an American athlete who was very famous in inline skating called Chad Hedrick. And he, towards the end of his inline skating career, he decided to switch to ice skating and then went and won an Olympic gold medal. After transitioning from one sport to another, something like two years later. So it's close enough that you don't need to change your fitness in order to really perform, having come from one sport to the other. But it's also different enough that you can't expect that just because you can rollerblade that you can also ice skate. There are some nuances to it.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which, I mean, as somebody who can't actually skate at all, Daniel, I've gotten a pair of the blades and thought, I want to learn, I want to play this, I want to play hockey, I want to do this. And then I put the skates on and I chicken out because I'm just chicken shit. But I think it's really fascinating, having grown up in Hobart, and I covered a lot of our very small, tiny local ice hockey league here, is that most of those players would be recruited from roller hockey and the roller sports, obviously, because there's much more of a roller sports scene in a summer country, particularly in Hobart, where we've got a tiny little rink versus an ice one. Did you find when you came back to Australia and you were saying, I want to go into ice skating, speed skating, rather than roller, what's that attitude like in the roller community then? Is it looked upon? Is it a lot of people do that? Or like, mate, you're crazy? Who wants to go into a rink? You're not going to be able to do this? I mean, is there an attitude at all when you sort of start saying that to people?
DANIEL GREIG: Absolutely, there is. I think because those communities in Australia are just small communities anyway, because they're not really big sports within Australia. They're always afraid to lose someone who might be one of their shining stars. So there was a little bit of attitude that I faced when I came back and I said, look, guys, I want to have a shot at ice skating. There was this attitude, rather, I think it was no matter how I pitched it, it was received as that I wanted to leave sport A behind and then go pursue sport B. When the way that I saw it was very much what I'd seen the Dutch doing is that one sport supported the other, because that is the origin from inline skating. And it's not not as if they were two separate sports that were conceived off completely separately. They were always meant to be done together. And that's still my attitude to this day. And that's always how I trained, actually, from one sport to the other. In the summer, if I wanted to make my ice skating better, I trained on inlines. And if I wanted to keep my inline skating good in the winter, I would train on ice with ice skates on.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's fascinating to kind of have that, isn't it? It is a sport that's all but been invented to complement the ice and that there's kind of that attitude. I mean, I look at something like Rugby League and Rugby Union, where Rugby League's kind of invented as a, hey, this is an off season sport to keep union skills intact. And then a lot of people in Rugby League, well, no, I don't have anything to do with Rugby Union. No, that's a different sport or vice versa. It's interesting when these sports exist because of the other one. And yet you kind of so much against the other one.
DANIEL GREIG: That's such a fantastic example as Rugby League and Rugby Union. And I think that's maybe people don't know enough about the history of the sport. They're actually in to realise that that's the case. Or maybe that's just naturally part of sports. People that are drawn to sport have that sort of instinct of forming a team and competing against another. And yeah, of course, then you end up with an us versus them mentality no matter where you are. That's something that always pops up.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which when it then comes to making that switch, and okay, I'm going to concentrate on the ice aspect of the skating. Does it cross your mind to look at something like short track? Just because again, back to my intro, where Australians often think of our sort of success in the Olympics and it comes to the short track. That's what we mostly think, even though, as I said too, we've obviously got a very long history with the long track. And also more so the fact that if you're in Australia, short track is an easier sport to, I guess, be able to train in because we obviously don't have any long track facilities in Australia where you can do short track. I mean, does that cross your mind at all?
DANIEL GREIG: Absolutely. And before I tried long track, I'd also tried short track. I'd gone along and I'd trained with some clubs a little bit here and there. I bought a second hand pair of blades from somebody and I had to go. There was a short track within driving distance from where I lived in Melbourne. And I had a little bit of the same attitude to short track. They're both ice skating. They both feel a little bit foreign to me. And I know that it's going to take a lot of work to get good at either one of them. And there was one very significant factor which steered me, or rather two significant factors that steered me towards long track is the first one. The one that I already said is I saw that there was a very strong history of people who grew up with inline skating, transitioning from inline skating to long track, had a very high success rate of being able to then perform at a world class level. So that was very much in the forefront of my mind. And the other one was somewhat opportunistically at the time is that coach who coached me to my first junior world title. At the time that I wanted to try long track, she was the coach for the inline speed skating team in the Netherlands. They'd offered her a job there. So I had a connection within that country that meant that I sort of felt less far from home. She wasn't an ice skating coach at the time. She was just focusing on inline. But when I went over there, we started this journey together of trying to learn this new sport. So very much at the time when I started learning ice skating, she did as well. And that was a journey together. And she took me all the way through to the Olympic Games with her support.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which I think the important thing for history buffs out there is that, yeah, OK, we can think of and not even just thinking of 2002. Obviously 1994, famously the bronze was Australia's first ever Olympic winter medal. But before Lillehammer, Australia's best ever result at a winter Olympics was Colin Coates. Got six in Innsbruck in the 10,000 metres in long track. So there's a trivial one for people at home who might think, like, what was Australia's best ever Olympic result at the winter Games before 94? Well, there it is. So it is that history that Australia does have in long track. I mean, how many long track skaters were in Australia when you made that transition? I mean, obviously Sophie, I'm guessing around that time had, I don't know if that was before or after Vancouver, but how many long track skaters even existed in Australia when you made that transition?
DANIEL GREIG: So, of course, I knew about Colin Coates, and there's another name, Danny Carr. I don't know if that name speaks to you. That's another quite from before my time, a high profile long track speed skater from Australia. And I think both of them were a little bit the same. They were just adventurers who were looking, just chasing that Olympic dream, and then just performed way better than anyone ever expected. They could like from a small country that doesn't have a long track speed skating team. So what Sophie happened to also, that's an interesting, that's a whole side story of its own, is the coach that got me into long track speed skating or rather got me to be a good athlete and got me into long track speed skating, Desley Hill. She brought me and Sophie and another Australian speed skating athlete with world champion medals, Joshua Loos, together at the same time in the Netherlands to learn long track speed skating together. So we were in a small city in the Netherlands, staying in hotel rooms in a city called Enschede, and we were allowed to use the facilities of the nearest ice skating track, basically before they were open to the public, because we couldn't afford to buy ice hours. Being Australians with no budget and no real proof that we would even be able to be good long track speed skaters. And I was with Sophie Muir right from the beginning. She came out of, I suppose, an early retirement from inline speed skating, came back as an incredibly talented athlete, picked up long track speed skating extremely quickly, and I was with her at the same competitions where she qualified for those Olympic Games in Vancouver. But I missed qualification for that Olympics by six hundredths of a second. Had I been just a little bit faster, I would have had three Olympic Games under my belt already. But Sophie was the best of that group that was attempting to do long track speed skating at that time.
BEN WATERWORTH: How does that work for qualification in terms of Australians, given that there's that limited athletes in the country for one sport? Do they have sort of regional based qualifications so that Australia combined with like Asia or sort of another place? Or is it simply a time thing? You've got to reach this time in the top 30 athletes in the world who reach that time at the Olympics no matter where you're from.
DANIEL GREIG: So within the winter sports, there used to be a set of rules for Olympic solidarity, which meant that they would have secondary qualification lists for countries that didn't yet have a participant in that sport. And what that would mean is, for example, if Australia didn't have anyone yet qualified for long track speed skating, the sport as a whole, if they were on that secondary qualification list, they would automatically get bumped up as the first qualified person. So you still had to be of a particular level, but if you were anywhere on that reserve list, you would be automatically qualified. But that was only valid for one person. And so Joshua Lose, the other skater that I mentioned, who was in that group of three of us, he was sitting on that qualification list, but because Sophie Muir qualified herself outright, he wasn't privy to using that rule. So had he been the only Australian speed skater at that time, he would have been the one qualified for the Vancouver Games and not Sophie. And I also sat on that list, but I had a lower ranking than Joshua did at that time.
BEN WATERWORTH: What was that moment, though, with Sophie qualifying? I mean, obviously disappointing that you don't qualify, but that was our first long track skater in what, 16 years, wasn't it? Since Lillehammer.
DANIEL GREIG: That was fantastic. And we were all super stoked because Sophie was just out there showing us that, yeah, even within a year and having not been in the sport, that with her inline skating background, she could really hit a high level. And if she chose that life, if she had chosen to go continue with the sport, I have no doubt that she would have been able to be one of the best in the world eventually. But there's always that choice you have to make if you want to dedicate so much of your life to a sport that really is just a passion. There was no chance it was going to pay her anything. She would have to be away from Australia for a very large amount of time. So it was bittersweet for everybody at both times, both when Sophie qualified and when she chose not to continue with the sport after that games.
BEN WATERWORTH: How do you work around training in Australia for long track, given that we do not have obviously a rink anywhere near the size of how big a long track is? Is it just a case you have to work on your starts and then everything else you just have to do overseas? I mean, is there anything you can do in Australia on the ice side of things to really train for the sport?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well leading into the 2014 Winter Games, I was back in Australia in the summer and I trained with our short track team quite a lot at the time. So I trained on the short track. I was probably with them maybe three or four times a week. And short track is a reasonably good way for training for long track, just because you still have a feeling for how a blade interacts with the ice. And that worked for me. And then in terms of my fitness and my strength, I just did a normal inline speed skater program. And I would be out training on empty roads in industry areas. And like cycling paths that weren't too busy. And just, you know, lifting weights in the gym, running, doing plyometric exercises. So that was all very much possible in the summer in Australia. And that was quite a large part of my preparation in the years leading up to 2014, when I wasn't overseas all that much except for competition times. And then when I was obviously when I was overseas, I had access to those full long track facilities, and that would probably be six months, seven months out of the year. So most of the year to if you want to take a sport like long track really seriously, you have to be all on the road travelling or in another country.
BEN WATERWORTH: Can you describe that moment when you first go to a long track venue? Because they're pretty impressive, aren't they? I mean, if people don't really know what they're like, I mean, it's like seeing an athletics track, but ice in sort of an indoor venue, right? They're a pretty impressive facility when you come across one for the first time.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, so that's... where do I start with that one? At first, it really, really hits you how much ice there is. There's just really a shitload of ice. And it literally, it's actually bigger than a 400-metre running track in terms of surface area.
BEN WATERWORTH: Because it's 500 metres, isn't it? A long track, is it?
DANIEL GREIG: It is 400 metres, a standard lap, but they have to have a third racing lane, which they use for warm-up and preparations. So, for example, with a normal 400-metre running track, just for athletics, you just have the racing lanes itself, and then athletes can go and warm up somewhere else and do their exercises somewhere else. But for a long track, when they're running events, there's a third inner lane that's always used for warming up, that the skaters use for warming up of the coming races. And that's always got to be added on extra to the amount of ice that they need to create the total venue. So that just means that some venues, they just choose to make a massive oval of ice with no gap in the centre. And other venues, yeah, at least then the track is going to be like 16 metres wide or maybe even more a thing. But that's the first thing. That's just the ice. And then you've got the sheer size of the building because every long track speed is getting. So you know that you barely fit a 400-metre oval into a full-on stadium. So you've got to think, okay, they've got to become to keep the ice in good condition. So, you know, you walk into the MCG and it's got an open roof on it. But imagine if that was like closed and sealed. So it's such a massive building. And when there's no one skating, the air is so still. And there's just this very strange echo, like you're isolated from the rest of the world. It's really, really quite bizarre. And then in the modern stadiums, there's a lot of reflective materials on the inside because it costs so much energy to keep all of that ice cool. They really try and pull out all the stops to conserve as much energy as possible. So some of the new stadiums, it feels like you're in this weird alien spaceship with like ice all over the floor. It's quite surreal.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which, because I mean, this is the beauty about so many winter sports, is that the facilities are so unique. Like you mentioned the MCG, you can use that for footy, for cricket, for athletic. You can use it for so many things, but it's kind of like, say, a bobsled track, right? You're not just going to build one of them for shits and gigs. You can only really use it for what, three different sports, and there's not that many in the world. So it's kind of, you know, there's a reason why Australia isn't clamouring over to build a long track oval anytime soon, because it's probably, unfortunately, not much use for many people, unless we're going to push for a 2034 Winter Olympic beat or something.
DANIEL GREIG: No, exactly. There's no real reason why Australia should build a long track, because it's such an expensive facility. Also, in the running cost, because of the amount of energy you need to keep the ice cool. And like you said, what are you going to do with it the rest of the time? Maybe you can hold events in there or something, but that's a pretty expensive event venue. And already I know that just because I'm involved in the ice skating community in Australia a little bit, the short tracks in Australia that we have, they're very hard to keep running as well, just because through the summer, how do you keep all of that ice cool? I mean, it's a lot smaller than a long track, but it's still a lot of ice that you need to keep at below zero while it might be 43 degrees outside.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which I think, I don't know what the number is at the moment, Daniel, but there's something like 20 ice rinks in the entire country of Australia, whereas you go to some suburbs of Canada and they've got 20 just in one suburb alone. So I think it's always unique when you learn about people like yourself and get into these ice sports in Australia who have to overcome so much, and particularly yourself on a sport where you can't train at a venue in Australia in your sport because we just simply don't have one.
DANIEL GREIG: No, that's it. And that's what made it quite hard for me to really decide to commit to the sport because I knew if I really wanted to have any kind of good go at it, I would have to do it from overseas. So I'd have to be spending a lot more time overseas, away from my family. And I ended up basing myself in the Netherlands for quite a lot of that. And luckily for me, it paid off. I got to go to two Olympics. I did manage to be, I think it was the first Australian to get a long track speed skating world championship medal. So in the end, it paid off, but I did have to sacrifice quite a lot. And I think the only reason that I did that is because I just really fell in love with the sport. I fell in love with the fact that inline and ice skating are so close together, and there's just one is the other side of the coin from the other. And it provided me so many opportunities to go to go to places and meet different people and represent Australia in a really, really professional sport. Because I would have never gotten the same kind of opportunity at something like athletics, like I'm an athletic guy, but I was just never as good at, for example, running the 100 metre sprint on shoes as I was at skating 500 metres on ice. So I knew where my chance was, and I just took it. But I think ice skating in general, no matter where you look in the world is a luxury sport, unless you're thinking about countries that have a lot of ice, naturally, almost every sport that has a strong ice skating program has to build artificial ice venues. But that doesn't mean that skating sports can't be a lot bigger than they are. But I think a lot of that comes from what we talked about earlier, is that there's just this natural divide that people consider sport A to be different from sport B, and then you have to choose between one or the other. And when you choose, you get stuck in that one subculture.
BEN WATERWORTH: Where did the love of the Olympics come from? Was there a particular Olympics that you remember watching for the first time as a kid, and this just connected with you and made you fall in love with them?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, absolutely. I remember sitting at home on a really, really hot day watching the Winter Olympics on TV in Salt Lake City. And I remember watching... I did watch the Long Track Ice Speed Skating. I didn't know that it was Long Track Ice Speed Skating at the time, but I remembered seeing a couple of names that I knew from Inline Skating Sport, and I thought, hey, I know those guys, and they're at the Olympics. They're skating on ice. And I was glued to the television. But then once the skating was done, then I was glued to the next thing, which was downhill skiing, and then I was glued to the next thing, which was the luge. And I thought, holy crap, every one of these sports is just amazing. And in a lot of those sports, people were explaining to me, and this was a lot of the commentary that you hear on the television, is that people were literally risking their lives to do them. And I was already from a young age, a bit of a daredevil climbing trees and riding my bike way too fast without a helmet and things like that. And that was really exciting to me, that people were really, they loved this enough to put their life on the line and go and do it. And that's still true, because I think there hasn't been a Winter Olympics that's gone by where someone hasn't unfortunately lost their life at the Games. So I don't know if that speaks to, yeah, the mentality of the people that do it or what makes sport great in the first place. I think a lot of sport we're training towards safety, and of course that's great for everybody involved. But I mean, it really stirs the emotions of everybody. If there's something on the line while you're competing, if there's really, really high stakes in the game, then yeah, everyone's heart rate, the people competing and the people at home, yeah, that goes up 20 beats or so.
BEN WATERWORTH: We like to call the Winter Olympics here and Off The Podium the real Olympics because let's be honest, there's no dud sports at the Winter Olympics. They're all perfect and they're all exciting. And I think one of my earliest memories of the Winter Olympics was 94 in Lillehammer. I remember the Norwegian Speed Skating team doing very well. I just remember the red suits and kind of being fascinated by these cool, you know, sort of the hooded lycra sort of outfits you're wearing and just being fascinated because that's the beauty for Australians watching the Winter Olympics, isn't it? We're seeing these sports that are so foreign to us. Like, yeah, swimming is great. You know, athletics is great. These are sports we do as kids. But when are we going to see speed skating? When are we going to see the downhill? Things like that. And it's just, it's so, something just so enthralling about it, isn't it, watching a sport that is just so foreign, but so damn exciting.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah. And I think TV even doesn't do enough justice to a lot of these sports. I don't know if you've attended some of, how many of these sports have you attended in person, actually? I'm curious.
BEN WATERWORTH: Are we talking winter?
DANIEL GREIG: Winter.
BEN WATERWORTH: I've seen ice hockey. I have sort of seen curling. I saw Canadian speed skaters, but they were on, not ice, they were practising with blades. Does that count? So not many. I sadly have not, I've seen figure skating, but outside of that, no, I've sadly not been able to see some of these other sports in person. Yet, I'll say yet, Daniel.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, yeah. And I think that, I suppose this is going to get solved with technology soon, with virtual reality and stuff like that. But a lot of these sports, so when you're talking ski jumping, luge, downhill, I think speed skating falls into that category. The TV can't communicate the speeds and the distances that are involved there. You know, a 400-metre ice oval, yeah, that looks quite small on the television. It looks like they're just skating around a track. But you go and stand within two metres of someone that's skating past you at 60 kilometres an hour, and you realise that that's really, really fast for a human to be going with nothing but a couple of knives strapped to their feet. And then you go and you look at the ski jumping, and as a speed skater, I go and I stand at the ski jumping, and I go, holy crap, these people are properly crazy. What I do is got nothing, because these people are literally launching themselves off of a ramp to go and fly more than 140 metres through the air at 100 kilometres an hour. And then I think, okay, I'm a pussy. I've got no balls at all.
BEN WATERWORTH: Is there a normal winter sport? I often like to question some of these athletes, and just like moguls, who wants to ski down bumps and hurt their knees? Aerials, who wants to do that and potentially break your neck? I'm trying to think, even curling, who wants to push a stone down the ice to get it? I don't think there's a normal winter sport where any of you guys are actually normal, which is a great thing. That's why the Winter Olympics are so great.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, that's it. That's it. Everything, it's like someone just thought of, what are all the most extreme things we can do in the winter? And let's just put them all together and have nuts people go in and do it. And that's what makes it so damn entertaining. So it's not just the fact that people have to be really fit and really skilled to do these sports. They've also got to be a little bit nuts. And I think that's what adds that extra bit of flavour. Like, no disrespect at all to the Summer Olympics, because there's...
BEN WATERWORTH: They've got it easy, Daniel. They can run down a track, whoop-dee-fucking-doo. Like, good for them. Like, who's the fastest in a straight line? Aren't we special?
DANIEL GREIG: I don't know. I think those track cyclists have got some balls, because that's another one you go and stand next to it, and you think, okay, these guys are really doing something dangerous here.
BEN WATERWORTH: That is, I remember my first velodrome experience, and you don't realise how goddamn steep those things are. Like, it's just, it is insane, which, I mean, there's lots of transition. I was going to sort of quickly, before we get to your Olympic experiences, the training aspect, the legs, the lactic acid, all that kind of work that you've got to put into yourself for a competition. I mean, track cycling, there's a lot of transition. You see a lot of sort of track cyclists and speed skaters. I know there's a few Canadians who've obviously done that, but everyone talks about skipping leg day. You can never skip leg day in speed skating, can you? That's every day is leg day in speed skating, surely to work up on the damn lactic acid in the legs.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, yeah. You said something quite funny. So there's a friend of mine, a very famous American inline skater, he makes t-shirts that say every day is leg day. I've actually got one of them, because that is true. Every day is leg day as a speed skater. You go skating, it hurts your legs. You go in the gym, you're doing leg exercises, that hurts your legs. You go cycling, because you want to do a bit of cross training, that hurts your legs. When you're in a heavy speed skating program, then stairs are definitely your mortal enemy.
BEN WATERWORTH: Always taking the lift. I always love finding about the mental aspect of athletes, which how do you sort of overcome those moments where mentally you are saying no, but you know that physically you can say yes, that you still have reserve going. I mean, is there training aspects you kind of have to work on with the coaches and everything along those lines to help overcome those moments when the mind over matter really has to kind of come into play?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, so that's an interesting one is that the whole idea of separating your mind from your body as them being separate entities there, I think that's the biggest, maybe not a mistake, but I think that's where people get into a lot of trouble, is that they believe that one is ruling the other rather than that they're one in the same. But that's my personal philosophy. So starting from the beginning, getting better at anything is just doing it a lot. You want to get better at skating, you just do it a lot. And if you do it a lot, eventually you're going to come into a situation where you're tired and your legs hurt, and you've just got to keep going. And that's the first characteristic of anyone that's an athlete, is the people that can keep going into that pain zone and just pushing through. Regarding the pain is not necessarily something that's threatening to you, but as something that's required to get what you want. And that's probably an analogy you can use for a lot of different areas in life. So that in itself is not particularly that special. And you can make training programs that just focus on hurting all the time. And eventually from those training programs, you can produce an athlete that's very good at just putting themselves in the pain cave and hurting. And I would say that that's a general approach of what a lot of cyclists take. Because riding something like the Tour de France is just a lot of being uncomfortable. And that's what my cyclist friends tell me. All you have to be good at is just really being uncomfortable. And then the people who are also physically talented and have more fitness, those are the ones that really rise to the top.
BEN WATERWORTH: You know, it's fine when I do these interviews though. It's kind of when I go to the gym, believe it or not, I do go to the gym. Sometimes I literally am like listening to everything you're saying about these sort of things and going like, well, look, if I can't run this long on a fucking treadmill, then, you know, I'm never going to be like, think about all these and what the Olympians do and all that kind of stuff. And like the pain train and everything along those lines. So I just want to say on behalf of yourself and everyone who I've ever interviewed, thank you for being inspirational for my, you know, pretty crummy gym routine that I do maybe once a month.
DANIEL GREIG: No worries, no worries. Have you experienced though that if you do a harder gym routine, you get more endorphins, you get more of that good feeling afterwards?
BEN WATERWORTH: Absolutely. And it's kind of interesting because it does, it's kind of one of those weird things, isn't it? Where you think to yourself, ah, can't be bothered going to the gym today. I'm feeling pretty shit, kind of all that sort of stuff. But then ultimately when you go, you come home pretty good. Like, let's keep going. Like it's kind of weird, isn't it?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah. So that's one thing, that's one thing that a lot of people can relate to is, okay, you go and you do a really hard work and you come out the other side feeling really good. And from the outside, that's the perspective that a lot of people have of the life of an elite athlete, is that, okay, you get to do that twice a day. So twice a day, you get to feel really good. But one of the things that people don't realise is that eventually, if you train hard enough, that doesn't happen. You don't feel good afterwards. You just feel awful all the time, because you're going so much further than what your body thinks is natural and what your body thinks is safe, that it tries to quite seriously object to the things that you're doing. And among the elite athletes that I've seen in all of the different sports, I know that within that subcategory of elite athletes, you've also got people where that mental capability of being able to push through the pain, that that's not even the limitation anymore on their performance. So when you say that the body's got more, but the mind is a limiting factor, there are select few athletes that you come across where actually it's the other way around, where they just don't have that safety mechanism built in anywhere, and they will keep going until their feet fall off. So the only thing that will stop them is the fact that someone has to take them to the hospital in an ambulance. And I think there are other athletes that maybe once or twice in their career can experience that level of being able to push through the pain. And I think that the ones who really excel are the ones who have a balance somewhere in between, that they both have the ability to really switch that pain response off, but also know when to stop. Know when to stop. So that's a whole other world that it's difficult for people to empathise with. And the best way that I could even attempt to approach an analogy of this is that there's an addiction there, and it's not an addiction to the endorphins that you get after exercising. It's an addiction to just being better. Being better at the sport that you want to compete at. And for some elite athletes, that being better means winning. Some of them are really winning focused. Others are just focused on that they're the most perfect they can possibly be at speed skating or skiing or cycling. And that's that other place where they draw that motivation from to do what normally a human body shouldn't be able to do.
BEN WATERWORTH: When it comes to choosing the disciplines in speed skating, obviously you've got everything from the 500 right through to the 10,000. Is it a similar thing to swimming in athletics where I'm going to be a sprinter, I'm going to be better at the 500, the 1,000, I'm going to be a long distance speed skater? Because I look at someone like Colin Coates, who is competing in everything from the 10,000 to the 500 metres. I can't imagine that's something that's probably common in modern day, or is it? Were you able to have a crack at the 10,000 metres on a Sunday if you wanted to give it a go?
DANIEL GREIG: If I wanted to give it a go, there's no one that would stop me from going and standing on the start line and having an attempt. But with regards to myself, it was pretty clear that from a young age for me, I had a particular talent for the shorter distances. I was a bit more explosive, I had a bit less endurance, I could move faster, I was a bit stronger in terms of raw strength. So right from the beginning, that's where I focused was the 500 was potentially my better event. But in practice, my results in the 500,000 always seemed to be quite similar. And that's where I just kept my focus. And if you look at my inline speed skating results from my inline speed skating world championships, I'm better at the events that are even shorter than the 500 metres. So there are a number of events that you get on inline speed skating that don't exist within ice speed skating that are made from a bunch of knockout rounds, but of a shorter distance than 500 metres. So you'll have like heats and semis and quarters, quarters and semis and finals. So you might have to do it five or six times in total, but the distance might be 300 metres, 200 metres, a lot similar to athletic distances.
BEN WATERWORTH: Just one quick question, actually. I've always wanted to know the answer to this. It might be an obvious one.
DANIEL GREIG: I don't know.
BEN WATERWORTH: Maybe I'm just stupid. But the arm movement in speed skating, how important is that sort of while you're out there skating on the ice? Because it's not something you really see in short tracks. Obviously, it's a little bit different. But I mean, is that aerodynamic reasons? Is that kind of to help you skate faster? What does the arm movement come down to?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, so you can really get into the weeds here. But I'll try and keep this quite short. The short answer is, two arms resting on your back makes you more aerodynamic because you catch a lot less wind. A lot of skaters from middle distances, they opt for keeping one arm swinging and the other one on their back. Having one arm swinging is for a couple of reasons. One, it helps with the timing of when to push, which is a very important aspect of speed skating technique. And another one is that when you're travelling through the corner or down the street, throwing an arm forward can help you deliver a little bit more power to the ground. And that's why you see skaters, especially in the 500 metre and in the beginning phases of other races, they'll use both of their arms because that means they can deliver anywhere between 20 and 30% extra power into the ground when they use their arms, which is, yeah, might sound really obvious, but that's the reason why running people use their arms is because it helps them more efficiently deliver the power from their muscles into the ground. But the reason why you never see anyone, you know, throwing both of their arms behind them for aerodynamic reasons is because they simply don't travel fast enough through the air to need an aerodynamic advantage like that. But when you're talking about speed skating speeds of plus 50 Ks an hour, there's a serious aerodynamic advantage to be had by sometimes choosing not to swing your arms and just hold them on your back.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, wow. I mean, I'm a Formula One fan, so kind of aerodynamics and things like that have always interested me, but it's just, I've never had the opportunity to speak to a speed skater before about it, Danny, so I just thought, I've got to ask that question as a Ben Mordeworth, you know, dumb question of the episode, really. So there you go.
DANIEL GREIG: It's the smartest dumb question so far, probably.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, thank you. That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me on this show. Your first Olympics, Sochi, you obviously narrowly missed out on Vancouver. You touched on it before. You pick up a bronze at the World Sprint Championships in Nagano not long before the Sochi Olympics, which, as you also said, the first time Australia ever medalled at a world championship for long track speed skating. What's that moment like to pick up a medal a month away from an Olympic Games? If you're going to do it, you're going to do it a month away from an Olympic Games. Had you qualified for Sochi at that point? Did you know you were going as well with everything that kind of happened in that moment?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, I already knew that I was going to the Olympic Games because I had qualified for it, I think, about three months beforehand at a round of World Cups. And I was really just training for the Olympic Games. And I think a little bit of what happened there was perhaps I accidentally peaked a little bit too early.
BEN WATERWORTH: That's a good way of doing it. Yeah. Whoops!
DANIEL GREIG: No, that's... Well, I mean, from a physiological point of view, you write elite sport programs to try and get an athlete to have as much fitness and feel as fresh as possible at a single point in time. And usually you try and get that single point in time to be the biggest race of the year. And for me, at that World Championships, everything just really... I was skating really well beforehand, but the thing that got me that bronze medal at that World Championships was my consistency was incredible. I skated pretty close to my maximum potential at that time, four races in a row, and all of my direct competition to get onto the podium, they made mistakes in one of the four events, which allowed me to gain advantage over the final ranking. And yeah, that was just... It was something we didn't expect. We knew that I always had the potential to be one of the best, given that my pedigree from inline speed skating meant that I was one of the more talented people standing on the start line, but my ability to turn that talent into real results, that depended on my training program and how well I could learn skating technique and how well I could approach the competitions themselves. Yeah, no one expected it, and it happened, and I was probably not ready for it and kind of in awe of it for the next... Up until I stood on the start line of the Olympic Games, and I continued to do... In that training period in between, I continued to put down really impressive times in training. And possibly the only reason why I didn't medal at the Olympic Games is because I medalled at the World Championships. I'll explain that in that I was so hyped and so green, so inexperienced that I didn't know what to do with that level of arousal that I arrived at the Olympic Games with.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, I was going to ask that, because I can imagine that adds a little bit of extra attention to the Australian media, Channel 10 at the time, broadcasting the Olympics. They're probably going to go, hey, this guy just got a bronze at the World Championships. Let's focus on things like that that probably you maybe weren't expecting. You could have been a bit more incognito at an Olympic Games, but all of a sudden, boom, there's a bit of extra attention on you.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, so I'm not sure I felt the external attention so much. For sure, it had an effect, but I'm more of an introvert personality, so I don't really get affected from the external circumstances all that much. But internally, there was a huge dialogue going on of, yeah, maybe you can do this. And that was really helpful in a lot of ways, but just at the last moment, yeah, it was too much. And when I say it was too much, the day of that 500, I was a spring bouncing off all the walls. I was way too high energy for everybody. And a little tidbit that I'm not sure anyone knows about my journey to that Olympics is, graciously one of the commercial teams from the Netherlands allowed me to train with them. And my training partner was a Dutch guy called Michel Molder. And he was actually the guy that won gold at the World Championships and the Olympics. And all that year, I was just nipping at Michel's heels in terms of speed and power. And I was the closest to him I'd ever been in the week leading up to that gold medal that he got at the Olympics. And all I did was I overcooked my first race. So to explain that into layman's terms is when you're trying to run with blades on your feet, the amount at which you lean forward to move forward is really important because you always need to leave enough space between your body and the ground to pick that blade up off the ice again, bring it underneath your body and place it down again. It's not quite like running. When you run, you don't really worry about that your feet are going to scrape the ground or not. But when you've got a blade that's 17 inches long strapped to your foot, you really need to worry about how much space you leave there. And there's a really fine line between how much you lean forward, how more you can lean forward, great English, how more speak you can make. So I've been speaking Dutch earlier today, so it's a little bit rough.
BEN WATERWORTH: Feel free to speak Dutch. I won't understand you, but our Dutch listeners probably would.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, all three of them.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, exactly. They're sitting here for nearly 200 episodes going, where are they going to speak Dutch on this show? I'm sick of this English.
DANIEL GREIG: Such a common language it is. Anyway, if you lean forward more, you'll travel forward more quickly, especially in the first metres of the race. But if you dial it back a little bit, you'll make sure you have enough space to get that blade through. And I thought I was there, and somewhere in the back of my head, I thought, fuck it, it's the Olympics. I'm going all or nothing. And I just threw it in there, and I didn't have enough space. And within the first 10 metres of the race, I caught my blade on the ice and I crashed. And that was the end of it. So that was the end of my chance to pick up a medal at that event. And I was never going to have a chance to pick up a medal on the 1000 metres, but I had qualified for it, and I competed in it anyway. And one of the nice things, I guess, a nice confirmation for myself is, at the 1000 metres, there's always a 600-metre split time. And I had, I believe, the second fastest 600-metre split time of any of the athletes who competed in the 1000 metres. But unfortunately, I could never get the last 400 metres together. I always completely exploded and slowed down way too much. So I ended up 20th or 21st in the 1000 metres. But that was a nice confirmation for myself.
BEN WATERWORTH: Single medal in the 600 metres. You can take that.
DANIEL GREIG: The unofficial silver medal on a split time for a distance.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, take it. I would remember that for the moment. Which I mean, obviously the answer, the question, how did you feel that moment when you crashed, is obviously incredibly disappointed. But I mean, you've built up sort of all this to get to an Olympics, and you sort of going into it with that. What happens when you sort of have to back up and go for that second race in the 500 knowing that really the chance of that medal is going to... How are you able to kind of put that in the back of your mind and just go, okay, well, I'm going to do the best I can right now and maybe show what I was capable of in this second part, which could have gone a completely different way had I not fallen over?
DANIEL GREIG: Now, maybe I'm going to share things I shouldn't share right now, but I think it's interesting for people and it's nice to know.
BEN WATERWORTH: We like hearing these secrets. Go for it.
DANIEL GREIG: I'm going to start with media training. So every Olympic, Australian Olympic athlete, they receive an amount of media training. And one of the things they teach you is how to handle, you know, not getting your best result. So not turning up on TV and being a crybaby about stuff. But one of the strategies that they teach you for this is, you know, of course everyone has to vent if they don't have a good experience, but just make sure you do all of your venting off camera. So don't go on TV. No one wants to see that. Let's be honest, no one wants to see that. So what I did after that first 500 metre is, there's an hour and a half in between the 500 metres, by the way. And after that first 500 metre, of course, I left quite abruptly. Actually, let's take two steps back. I had a choice at the moment that I was laying on the ice after I crashed. I could have exited the track without completing the distance, which would have meant that I was immediately out of the whole competition, because I didn't complete the distance. Or I could finish the distance and be able to stand on the salt line for a second try. So I made the choice at that moment to get up, yeah, very slowly skate out the entire distance so that I could have another attempt, even though I knew that at that moment, any chance of an Olympic medal was completely out the window. So I did that, took my skates off, obviously very frustrated, didn't talk to anybody, remembered my media training, I went and found a dressing room somewhere in the venue that was devoid of anybody, and I proceeded to smash a lot of things. Just everything I could find got thrown at the wall and broken. And I got that out of my system within about 30 minutes, probably used way too much energy.
BEN WATERWORTH: 30 minutes? That's a lot of smashing.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a couple of people that I trusted on the phone in that time too, just venting, talking to them. And then I didn't even warm up for the second race. I mean, I was warm because I was fairly physical in between, but I put my racing suit on, I put my skates back on, and I just lined up for the second race. But there's no amount of, or at least I don't think there's any amount of psychological repair that could be done in that amount of time that would get me back to in a frame of mind that would have been optimal enough to go and put down a second race that would be good enough to show that I was the best. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, but like I said, when I turned up to that Olympics, I was incredibly green. I didn't have the experience that I probably would have needed on large ice skating events to handle all the things that were being thrown at me. So I turned up, I stood on the start line, I did another race. My time was about what? I think four tenths of a second too slow to be up with the guys that were really competing for the medals. But yeah, obviously not so far away to say that I was in a completely different class. But unfortunately, that time was worth nothing.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, 17th I'm seeing here. So you still, you make top 20 on that top, that second time for something you didn't train and you were smashing shit for 30 minutes. That's pretty decent.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, I thought so too.
BEN WATERWORTH: Look, I'm trying to get the positives here again. Silver medal in the 600 metres, top 20 in that second 500 after smashing crap for half an hour and not really doing a warm up. I mean, let's be honest, that's pretty darn good for an Olympics. Just putting the silver lining on it for you there, Daniel.
DANIEL GREIG: No, I was in the end. I reflect on that whole Olympics as actually an incredibly positive experience in my life, because I didn't get to show my sporting credentials, but I really got a lot of experience in handling things and situations that have benefited me in so many other ways in the following years. And I don't have many tattoos that people know about, but I actually have a tattoo of Russian folk art to remind me of that forever, because I still view it as a positive experience in my life. And at that time, my training partner, one of my close friends, someone who I spent a lot of time training with, and I suppose fighting with in trainings, he came away with a gold medal. So, yeah. Emotional roller coaster, to say the least.
BEN WATERWORTH: Do you at least get to watch the X-Files with him? Like, with a name like Molder, I can't imagine that he never gets that all the bloody time, but I mean, if he doesn't, I mean, come on. I can't say two things. You ever watched the X-Files with a guy with the last name of Molder, and secondly, a Dutch speed skater? I can't imagine that's something that a lot of people have done.
DANIEL GREIG: I'm not sure he even knows what the X-Files is.
BEN WATERWORTH: There's got to be a Dutch dub out there somewhere. You know, find another skater with the last name of Scully, and then kind of you're all up there with that. But obviously between Sochi and Pyeongchang, you have injuries, surgery, everything else that you're overcoming. So kind of when you then get to a second Olympics, I'm assuming the mindset is completely different having overcome sort of what you've had at Sochi and the injuries and everything, you know. Sochi, you've gone in with one mindset. What was the mindset going into Pyeongchang?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, so Pyeongchang came just a little bit too quickly for me. I think one year too early for the amount of time that I would have needed. So yeah, obviously after Sochi, I sort of took a step back from Speed Skating. I needed to get operations on both of my knees. I had some complications in my rehabilitation from those operations that meant that it took quite a long time before I was, I guess, minimally functional again. And by that time, I was starting from a fitness level of zero. And that time starting with a fitness level of zero was probably one and a half, a little bit more than one and a half years out from Pyeongchang when I really started training like an elite athlete again. And realistically, that's not enough time to get in the kind of shape that you need to be to win an Olympic medal. So I was quite satisfied with the shape that I turned up in Pyeongchang with, like good enough to get, I think it was a 20th place on the 1000 metres. And I skated, yeah, an okay-ish time on the 500 metre, but I qualified, I was there. I had some results that season that were, I believe, I think my best result that season was a 10th at a World Cup. So there was probably a potential for me to get a 10th at the Olympics too. But just I was fighting so much trying to just trying to get back in the game that my goal for that Olympics was realistically never to go for the medals. And that's what I had hoped to do four years later. And that was my plan. So after after Pyeongchang, if I just gloss over Pyeongchang really quickly, I went back to inline speed skating sport a lot more. I attended more events. I attended more world championships than I had done in the previous years. Because in the previous years, I was injured or I was really focused on trying to get back on level for ice speed skating. And yeah, I was putting down some amazing results there, like world top five in 2019. I was world champion on inline speed skates again. And that was a real nice confirmation that yeah, I've reached a real peak level of fitness again. And I was hoping to bring that through to the coming Winter Olympics, but unfortunately, that's not going to be possible.
BEN WATERWORTH: And why is that? Why are we not going to be seeing you in Beijing. Very shortly? What's that? Must be a European thing.
DANIEL GREIG: Something like a weird European cold. Anyway, so that changed, especially for people that needed to go outside and go into gyms for their work or for their sport. Let's be honest. It changed everything for everybody. But for trying to maintain your fitness, I think the whole world took a hit. Lockdown did no favours to the health and fitness of anybody. And then when being healthy and fit is your sport, particularly so is your job by me. And I got dropped into or was forced into a training program that was suboptimal. But just because of the ways that we had to train, didn't have access to normal facilities like we usually did, couldn't be outside as much as we needed to be. Quite a lot more time spent inside sitting on chairs. And the result of a year of training like that meant that my back just gave out. And I think that was because I was doing a lot of training in suboptimal ways, not necessarily correctly. I was spending a lot more time sitting down than I usually would because of lockdowns. And I've got some signals that that wasn't going so well for my back, but at the same time, I knew that you either get fit now or you give up on trying to get a medal at the next Olympic Games. So I just pushed through. And eventually it got so bad to the point where, yeah, we realised that I had to have some kind of intervention to remedy the situation. So I was starting to get like classic sciatic nerve symptoms with like numb left foot, pain walking, things like that. And every athlete, they had some pains that they pushed through. So I had those and yeah, that's not necessarily always a really bad sign for an athlete. But we got some imaging done and we realised, oh shit, there's just not enough space for my nerve to move in my back anymore. And at that moment, that was in February of this year, then I had a choice. I could either get a pretty serious operation to make more space for the nerve, from which any operation you need to do rehab. Or I could choose a conservative route and let it heal on its own, but give up on any chance of going to the Olympics at all. And one of the things, obviously when we're talking about things to do with your nerves and your spinal column, it's quite scary. You start to think about your life after sport, and you think, oh, what am I... You know, if I have kids, do I want to be able to pick them up? You know, do I want to ever be able to go on a holiday where I go hiking somewhere with my girlfriend? Things like that. And at that moment, I suppose, I weighed the chance that I could go for another Olympic medal with the chance that I could potentially do very, very serious and lasting damage to my spine and potentially not be able to walk normal for the rest of my life. And yeah, I chose the more conservative option, which was not to get operated and just to give it some time to try and heal on its own. And then if needed, a small operation later down the road. And that meant, yeah, giving up on that Olympic dream. But I think I felt sufficiently satisfied with what I'd accomplished in the sport, to feel okay enough with myself with stepping out of it before I really got a chance to show my full potential.
BEN WATERWORTH: Which does that then, so that's it? There's no chance of sort of the recovery process you could see you go to Milan in 2026, or that's it, you're hanging up the skates now to kind of preserve that back?
DANIEL GREIG: That's still an open question, an open question as Milan 2026. So I have been saying that I want to return to inline skating on a semi-professional level next year. Once I've completely given my back a full year to recover, and see how that goes. And if that turns out to be no worries, all good, I might consider putting the skates back on and training for one more. That would mean that if I compete in Milan, I would be 34, but there are plenty of athletes who compete in that, yeah, once they're in their mid 30s. But I would say that the chance is pretty small, because once you lose that momentum in such a high level sport, it takes a large infusion of energy and resources to then get back up to that level. So it's not impossible, but if I somehow found a way to sufficiently support myself and my health and really give it another serious shot, then it's not completely off the cards.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, I just want to add this. We're going back to building facilities in Australia, maybe a bit impossible. The Brisbane Olympics in 2032, Daniel, are technically a Winter Olympics. So I'm just saying right now, we could contact the Brisbane Organising Committee and just be like, hey guys, kind of need a long track facility because it's a Winter Olympics. And what, you'll be what, 41, 42 by then? So I mean, you know, like it's kind of, it's a possibility to just keep the body in shape for another 11 years, home Winter Olympics, just saying.
DANIEL GREIG: I know maybe I could transition to cycling and have a go at that for an Australian Olympics. I think I'm a little bit small, too small to be a good track cyclist and probably not fit enough to compete with our road guys, but yeah, it's not impossible. I will say, though, Brisbane, when you say Brisbane, Brisbane's doing a really awesome thing right now for speed skating sport in general for Australia, is that they've committed to building a new inline speed skating facility, which is of the spec that they could theoretically hold a world championship sometime in the future, which is the biggest thing that's happened in inline speed skating in Australia in a very, very long time. And there are some people involved within the speed skating club in Brisbane that have been working their arses off for a lot of years to get this happening. And there have been people working their arses off in other states to try and get projects like this off the ground for a long time. But Brisbane is the first one that's sort of finally crossed the line in the sense that they've got the commitment for the funding to actually build a facility. So for all speed skating sport in Australia, long track speed skating, short track, I believe that this is a really huge step. Because I think that speeds, like roller skating, all roller skating sports could be a lot bigger in Australia. And I think there's potential for a lot of people to really enjoy themselves with that, because we are a country that has a lot of big open spaces where you could do roller skating sports, if that's inline hockey, or artistic skating, or speed skating. But we don't really make use of it, and I think it's just because the sport fell out of fashion a little bit in the last years, but it seems to be picking up again. So I'm excited to see how those things develop.
BEN WATERWORTH: Brisbane doing really great things. I mean, we just got the Jeff Henke Centre there, obviously with the Olympics kind of around the corner, everything kind of going there. And would you hope that like, if that goes ahead or even just in general, that we see some more long track speed skaters coming from Australia? I mean, where are we at right now? Do we have any potentials out there? Are we going to see a long track speed skater in Beijing for Australia?
DANIEL GREIG: Well, no, we're not going to see. The only thing that could potentially happen for a long track speed skater in Beijing is maybe one of our short track skating talents might transition to try and go for the double sport, which has happened before. There was a speed skater who got quite close in the past, but he didn't quite qualify. But in terms of dedicated long track speed skaters, unfortunately, right now, there is no one.
BEN WATERWORTH: He's saying I could be it. If I pick up the sport all of a sudden, Daniel, I could be Australia's number one chance for Milan. I should give it a crack.
DANIEL GREIG: If you're willing to do that to your life and your body, go for it.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, Eddie shot at an Olympics. I'm trying to find my in somewhere. If you're saying there's nobody right now in Australia that's dedicated, I will learn to skate first. That might help. And then it's all up from there.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah. Well, if you want some coaching, I'm here for you.
BEN WATERWORTH: Done. All right. There we go. I mean, too focused on curling and all these kinds of sports. That's my bet. No, I need to look at the chances here. So Milan, look out, if not Milan, then Vancouver slash Salt Lake, where was going to have it in 2030? You know, I'll only be, what, 43 by then. I'll be fine.
DANIEL GREIG: Well, there's probably going to be a speed skater at the Olympics who's in their late 40s.
BEN WATERWORTH: How old is Irene?
DANIEL GREIG: Not impossible.
BEN WATERWORTH: She's what? Got to be in her mid 30s now, doesn't she, Irene? She's up there a little bit. Kind of.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, there is one skater from Germany. I forget her name. But I think she'll be in her late 40s if she qualifies for this Olympic Games. That's pretty damn impressive.
BEN WATERWORTH: We constantly bring up Andrew Hoi being 62 in Tokyo, but let's be honest, the guy's just riding a horse. This isn't speed skating now. No disrespect to the great Andrew Hoi, but there's a difference there. Couple of quick things before we get to our wrap up questions. Just in general about the Olympic experiences, you talk about how you obviously switched to the ice to pursue that Olympic dream. We always love to kind of hear just from our guests about those subtle Olympic experiences, the village, the opening ceremonies, if you do it, you know, kind of all those sort of stuff. Like, do you soak that in more in a second games, kind of what you were talking about, how you were going into Tosocchi, or were you able to soak it all in sort of at both Olympics and have some different experiences?
DANIEL GREIG: Well, that's a... So I'm going to give a complicated answer, and the answer is that depends. So you might have heard possibly from some of the Summer Olympics, especially the ones with athletes where they might necessarily have their event on the first day of the games. And then athletes are presented with a very difficult choice. Do you attend the opening ceremony or not? Because the opening ceremony costs a lot of energy and time. So as an athlete, that's a massive logistical undertaking from the organising committee and the athletes. They get funneled into buses and then waiting areas, and then you've got to be clothed properly. Maybe you'll eat something on the way. Maybe you won't eat quite enough. There's a ridiculous energy in the air by an opening ceremony that's both fantastic and extremely tiring at the same time. And anyone who's attended an opening ceremony will let you know that you barely sleep afterwards because you're so buzzing with like enthusiastic energy. And then if an athlete, if they've got to go and compete the day after, that's obviously not the optimal preparation for getting the most out of yourself. So my first Olympics, I did a very, very short version. So they give you, usually they give you the opportunity to go and view a little bit of it and then sort of go away again and go back home. So I managed to do that. The second time around, I did the full opening ceremony experience because I knew that I wasn't there to compete for medals. So I thought I need to experience it then. I need to go and do it. The first time I went in, I was very much of the opinion myself that I was capable, if everything went well, to get a medal. So I took the conservative option on all of those choices. But the second time around, it is a ridiculous experience. It's something that you really can't compare to any other. Any other experience I've had in my life is that there's so many people with such a positive energy, all collected in the same place. When you watch the Olympics opening ceremonies on TV, you see that the acts that they prepare, it's just so much effort goes into things. And the things that you see, they always have some performers performing that are also extremely amazing in their skill at what they're doing. And that's always really inspiring. And just then you start getting exposed to people from other countries, you see people in other sports, and you know that every single one of those people that you talk to and you come in contact with, they're all been the kind of people that get up at like 6 a.m. in the morning, go and train, go and push their body harder than anyone else, or they try to harder than everyone else. They've all made sacrifices to be there. And this is the culmination of all of that effort. And everyone is in anticipation of what the results are going to be. So that nervous energy is just like a tidal wave that rushes over you. And me being not a particularly emotional person, even I really feel it and go, wow, that is something. And I think everyone else that I talk to about the opening ceremony, they all speak about how that level of emotion, collective emotion and energy that you feel is just something that you don't feel anywhere else.
BEN WATERWORTH: Fantastic. Now, I love hearing that. And that's something I always comment on. It's like, yeah, that obviously difficult decision if you're competing the next day, make that decision. I've always said just as the armchair critic, like, fuck that. I'm going, I'm not missing out on the opening ceremony, but, you know, I can obviously understand that that's a little bit difficult sometimes.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah. Well, if you knew that the choice was between, oh, go to the opening ceremony and potentially lose to someone by a couple of hundreds of a second, or, you know, just stay home one more night and then have the biggest party of your life the day after.
BEN WATERWORTH: I can watch BTS on TV. I don't need to be in that stadium. They're still on the same screen, right? Like, you know, kind of going that way. The other thing, I've always been intrigued about this, because again, back to my point, I've never spoken to a speed skater before. Does Cathy Freeman owe the sport of speed skating some royalties for her uniform that she wore at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, because that was just stolen directly from speed skating, was it not?
DANIEL GREIG: Um, I believe it loosely was, yes, because there was a whole development project, I believe. Well, I might get this completely wrong as well, but I believe it was Nike that were developing those speed suits, both for running and for speed skating, and it was part of the same aerodynamics project. And those speed skating suits that they subsequently used at the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Olympics were from the same class, like from the same development project.
BEN WATERWORTH: Maybe the speed skaters are Cathy Royalties, maybe it's the other way around.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, it might be the other way around.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, there you go.
DANIEL GREIG: Because those speed suits are still regarded as some of the fastest that were ever made in the history of the sport.
BEN WATERWORTH: And is it like a swimming thing, where they got to a point where the suits got too advanced and they kind of had to knuckle down on the technology because times were all of a sudden going way beyond what they should have been?
DANIEL GREIG: Well, so there were a couple of points, and I think speed skating has always been really on the ball when it comes to aerodynamic advantages. So there are some rules, and one of the rules in particular is that the suit has to conform to the body of the athlete. There are some really tricky stuff that you can do by like adding volume to the suit in certain areas to make a person more aerodynamic. You would think that if it's tighter, then it will be faster. No, but if you think about that, if you put a tail on something, it gets more aerodynamic. So at a certain point, they were starting to add like sort of false tails all over the suit to break the turbulent air behind, like a Formula One car actually. And those kinds of things, they got rained in really quickly. And the suit development is still moving forward, but they've got a collection of rules together now, which mean that other than really optimising the aerodynamic surface of the suits, there's not all that much you can do anymore to make the suits faster. But what speed skaters have started turning to now is altering the technique and their body position while they're skating to make themselves more aerodynamic. And that's where records are still getting broken every year.
BEN WATERWORTH: Does that mean, I feel like I have to ask this question, Daniel, but particularly in the men's side of things, if you're a bit more blessed in a certain area, does that help you aerodynamically? Because it's a tail or is it a hampering thing? I have to ask the question.
DANIEL GREIG: Practically, the biggest problem you're going to run into though is, I don't know if you've seen Speedy Skaters, but they have to cross one like over the other to turn around a corner. And for every man, you have to arrange it in a special kind of way to make sure you don't nut yourself every time you turn around. And for the bigger boys, that's a bigger problem.
BEN WATERWORTH: Right. I just needed to clarify there, like we commented a lot during Tokyo that certain countries had a bit of a bigger crotch bulge in the athletic side of things, and they seem to be running well. So I didn't know if it was transitioned across maybe. So I'm not sure if that's a question you often get asked about, Daniel.
DANIEL GREIG: If they've got something going on with ballast over there, I'm not sure, but that's something that hasn't reached speed skating yet.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yet, yet being the operative word, you know, it's maybe going to come across one day. We like to close off our chats in the series of kind of fun, get to know you style questions. These are based off a Team Canada questionnaire they gave their athletes ahead of both Rio and Pyeongchang. And I'm always excited when I can get an athlete from a sport, from the person who said, well, I've got a speed skater here. I've got Denny Morrison. Now, you ever competed against Denny? Is he in your sort of distances in the speed skating?
DANIEL GREIG: I believe he was actually the very first person I ever competed against at an international competition.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, there you go. It's come full circle. Now, I can see your answers to his questions and see who wins. And let's say you're going to kick his ass, because he's written some interesting ones here. So these are just dumb questions, probably the dumbest ones you'll ever. There is a drawing aspect. Actually, no, they've taken the drawing aspect out of it. Never mind. You don't have to do any homework, Daniel.
DANIEL GREIG: Good.
BEN WATERWORTH: You're lucky today. So we'll start off with, what is your favourite all-time Olympic moment?
DANIEL GREIG: Favourite all-time Olympic moment? I'll tell you what, it's probably, the one that hits closest to home is it's an inline speed skater winning a gold medal. Yeah, and it would be Chad Hedrick, as an American inline speed skater, so not an Australian one, but winning a gold medal in speed skating on the ice. That was just, no one expected him to do it, he just came out of nowhere, a little bit of a, everyone knew that he was particularly talented, and in everyone's eyes, he did everything wrong and still won. That was my favourite.
BEN WATERWORTH: I like that, just quickly on that, you mentioned before about sort of how close roller sports did come to becoming a summer sport. Is there still kind of, we've just seen skateboarding included, let's be honest, rollerblading is much more cool than skateboarding, that skateboarding was rubbish at the Olympics, I'm sure the rollerblading would be better than that.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, to be honest, I really didn't enjoy skateboarding at the Olympics either. I like skateboarding, I used to spend my youth at a skate park as well, but with skates on, but it just didn't work. I don't know, it just didn't work. Skateboarding can be so much more interesting than it was. And I really think that inline speed skating would have been a much better addition because imagine ice skating, but you can have courses that have like downhills and crazy dangerous corners and stuff in it. Like there's so much more potential entertainment value in there, but it got considered again into, I think when they went back to the table at 2012, denied again, 2016. And then it got added to the Youth Olympics as a test sport. So there is potential that it could be an Olympic sport in the future. So it's not completely off the table.
BEN WATERWORTH: There you go.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, I'm not up to date on whether there's been a decision made on Brisbane yet or not, but unfortunately I'll probably be too old by the time it happens. If it happens, and we have, and I'd love to have a strong Australian team at the time that it does happen. That would really, really make me happy.
BEN WATERWORTH: Once I hang up my ice skates after Milan, I'll switch over and then I'll join you on the Brisbane team for 2032, all right? So we'll be teammates. Done, your coaching would have paid off like really, really well at that point. As a kid, your favourite sports team was?
DANIEL GREIG: Richmond.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ooh, well, I mean, you know, you've done all right in the last few years, haven't you? So I guess I can't really comment on the cartons, Porter. So where do I have a chance to comment? Actually, seriously, I'm not meant to like Richmond. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Richmond growing up. They never win, and then they started winning. And then you had things like cocky Richmond supporters, and I didn't know how to handle that.
DANIEL GREIG: Are your Canadian listeners going to have any idea what we're talking about?
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, some will, some will. They are, actually Colin, he, our Canadian co-host, he's a brother, he's a mad AFL fan. So whenever I've gone over to visit him, he makes me bring him over like, buy me this team's flag and buy me this team's this and that and everything else. So yeah, it's a bit of following over there for that. If you could be a superhero, who would you be?
DANIEL GREIG: Silver Surfer.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, there's one we never get answered. Silver Surfer is cool. I think more people should answer Silver Surfer. So yeah, I want to see him in the-
DANIEL GREIG: Kind of similar to an ice skater, isn't he?
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, well, exactly. Now that Disney own everything and that we're going to see the Fantastic Four properly done, maybe they can bring, because we got Silver Surfer in the second Fantastic Four movie, didn't we? But it wasn't that good. So, yeah, prove it.
DANIEL GREIG: Needs a big role. Exactly.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, Disney big listens to this show, clearly. They're going to buy us out soon, probably. Your favourite music artists are?
DANIEL GREIG: That's a really different one, because I'm someone who listens to so much different music. Like, if it's a good example of the genre, I'll be listening to it. So, that's a really difficult question for me.
BEN WATERWORTH: Anyone you're listening to right now, maybe, that's kind of like, you know, just sort of, it's on the Spotify playlist.
DANIEL GREIG: No, I would say, you know what, one of my, the one that I, I'll pick one that at one time, I was extremely obsessed with, and luckily, it's an Australian band, it's Team Impala.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, yes, yes. What happened to them? Are they still around? I feel like we haven't heard from them in quite some time.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, yeah, they're still around, but I don't know, I feel like they're a little bit more busy touring, and they don't release a lot of new stuff, or at least it doesn't get as much in the spotlight as it used to.
BEN WATERWORTH: I worked at Sanity, these weren't for Australian listeners many, many years ago. Right, great store. One of my favourite, probably my only favourite retail job I ever had, but I remember that that was about the time when they were huge. I think they had a song on like Home and Away or something, and it really set them off. And yeah, everyone was coming in buying Tamer Parlor, and now, yeah, it's like kind of not quite on that level, but Sanity still exists, I think.
DANIEL GREIG: I don't think so, but I remember when they released their second album, I went to see them in Melbourne. That's still probably my favourite gig I've ever been to.
BEN WATERWORTH: Fantastic. Good memories. I like that. If you could eat one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
DANIEL GREIG: Mangoes.
BEN WATERWORTH: Oh, no hesitation. Mangoes. Done. Nice. Now, where you are in Europe, are mangoes common? Because you're a bit far away from the tropics, you can't really find a mango.
DANIEL GREIG: Not at all. Not at all. These days, since I'm not being an athlete anymore, I'm working because you've got to make a living and stuff. And I was actually working during my entire sport career anyway, but we didn't touch on that topic. But like we talked about beforehand, almost every winter athlete does. But I've been working, and the only way I could really continue working was to stay in Europe. So I was planning on coming back right before the pandemic broke out. I even had a flight ticket booked. And the day before I went to get on the plane, they cancelled my trip. So then, yeah, I've been living in the Netherlands since the pandemic broke out. And mangoes here are, yeah, not so great. I mean, you can get them, but they're really not worth eating. If you don't get a good mango, it's not worth going for it.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's kind of like if you're in the middle of, like, if you're in Ayers Rock or Uluru and, you know, somebody says he's had some fresh fish, you're probably, you know, you're not going to believe it.
DANIEL GREIG: You're going to take it with a grain of salt.
BEN WATERWORTH: Don't know about that. So just on that topic, like, so what is it, sort of what's the career outside of speed skating? Sort of what are the sort of the work that you are doing outside of your athletic career?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, I had a lot of jobs while I was while I was an athlete. So I was studying mechanical engineering at university while when I started sport. And then while I was doing that, I was working as a freelance software developer just because that was one of the few jobs I could do from pretty much everywhere. And I did that for a number of years. And then when I based myself to train in the Netherlands, when I was quite serious about getting to Pyeongchang, I managed to I got a job at a company. I started off as a data scientist, and then I progressed to a managing engineer managing a team of developers while I was training for the Olympics. And then, yeah, I might have got my timeline slightly wrong there, but then eventually I left that job because someone offered me the chance to be a paid athlete again. And I thought, I was like, you know what? Why not go for that and have a shot at that and see how that goes. But that didn't really work out for me. So then I thought, well, I've got this time on my hands, or rather, I've got this space that I'm not really tied to anything, that I want to do anything. So then I started a couple of my own businesses. And so these days, right now, I've got a software startup, and I've got an e-commerce business. And I'm working as a consultant, helping some Dutch speed skaters towards the coming Winter Olympics, because I've got speed skating knowledge. They've got speed skaters.
BEN WATERWORTH: They've got too many. Send some our way. Come on, what's going on? What's in the water there in the Netherlands? All these speed skaters. Calm down, all right?
DANIEL GREIG: It's in the milk, actually. They all drink a lot of milk.
BEN WATERWORTH: Okay, right. Just a really random question. I have to ask you, we're on the topic of the Netherlands. You already know I love Formula One. I mean, are you on the MAX train? Can you avoid anything to do with MAX over there at the moment, given that he's in a bit of a slipper right now?
DANIEL GREIG: I go and do my shopping, and there's cardboard cutouts of MAX in the supermarket. It is ridiculous. But of course, being on the MAX train is a difficult one, because there's that whole story about how Daniel departed from Red Bull because of their, I suppose, their attitude towards MAX. Yeah. So I'm very torn on that one, because I have a little bit of a soft spot for the Netherlands now, because I've spent a lot of my time there. But yeah, I would much rather Ricardo be the one winning.
BEN WATERWORTH: It's so easy. God, this is a whole other episode, but it's kind of weird how in Australia, people still really don't like Sebastian Vettel purely on the days that he was with Mark Webber at Red Bull because of sort of what happened there. And I've always found that really interesting, because I'm a big Vettel fan. Obviously, I'm a big Webber and a Ricardo fan, but Vettel is just one of the nicest people you will ever meet, and he's one of the most humble people you will ever meet. Yet people in Australia just cannot like him, so it's kind of interesting. I know a lot of Australians who don't like Max Verstappen because of things like that as well. So yeah, we're a grudge country, aren't we?
DANIEL GREIG: Maybe, maybe. We've all got a massive chip on our shoulder, no doubt. But when you get to elite sport, and especially when there's more money involved, there's a level of politics that I barely even understand, and it's very opaque from the outside. And no doubt there's a lot more that goes on there. And I think, or at least I know that at that level, that the athletes also accept that that political game is another game in itself. And I don't know what kind of feelings there would even be between Daniel and Max, but at the end of the game, I think every real elite athlete, as those guys are, learn to accept things the way they are and then just focus on the competition. And it seems like that.
BEN WATERWORTH: From what I've heard there, I heard Ricardo on a podcast recently, and he was saying that I think he was in LA or something like that, and he randomly bumped into Max, and they kind of hung out for a bit. So I don't think there's much. Mark Weber and Sebastian Vettel, for example, are friends now, so these things kind of over time clearly dissipate.
DANIEL GREIG: But that's it. Maybe things might have played out differently, but maybe there was just never any chance for that.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah.
DANIEL GREIG: Very true.
BEN WATERWORTH: At the end of the day, Ricardo won in a frickin McLaren in 2021.
DANIEL GREIG: Exactly. Which is fantastic. I was screaming at the TV. Yeah.
BEN WATERWORTH: And as somebody who grew up, you can see behind me, I've got a Ferrari hat, so I'm a Ferrari man. As somebody who grew up hating McLaren, it's probably the one time in my life I've ever cheered for McLaren. So, you know, that's... I'm allowed to at that point when it's Ricardo.
DANIEL GREIG: That's another interesting one, is if people are really cheering for the cars or if they're cheering for the drivers, because I'm always... With Formula One, I've always been, I just cheer for the Australian guy. And I was really disappointed when we didn't even have anyone for a couple of years.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, until Webber. It's the interesting... I grew up Schumacher, and then it just blended into Ferrari, and it kind of worked. Whereas now it's kind of... People ask straight out, who's your favourite driver? I've got a handful of drivers who I love, and then I still support Ferrari as a team. So it's kind of... And I like both the Ferrari drivers. There was a time there, Alonso Massa, I didn't like either of them. So I was like, oh, how do I support this team? And I don't like the drivers, but you go over the team. But, you know, I guess if you go for Richmond, you might not like some of the players. Anyway, whole other tangent. Your favourite place to compete is?
DANIEL GREIG: Calgary, actually. Calgary, in Canada. Because their ice skating arena is part of the university. So you've got this really interesting, weird blend of university culture and sport culture.
BEN WATERWORTH: And that was the Olympic Oval, was it? Not too, that was one of their ice skating events. Which does that then, on a tangent, because I like to talk about things that I like, does that make you a Flames fan? Do you follow NHL at all? And do you pick that up because you like the Calgary Oval? Because I'm a Flames fan, and you make me happy if you say yes.
DANIEL GREIG: So, I do watch Flames games, but just because I know some people that were on the staff of the Sabres, I might be more of a Sabres fan.
BEN WATERWORTH: No, look, I have a soft spot. I'm a Bills fan, so I've got to like the Sabres, so like weird connection, six degrees of separation. You didn't say Leafs, so Colin's not happy right now listening to this. One thing that you have always wanted to do is...
DANIEL GREIG: Shit. I'd love to go hiking in Peru, actually. Because as an athlete, a lot of the time when you want to go on a holiday, you don't choose really physical stuff because there's always that thought in the back of your mind of, oh, what if I tie myself out too much, or get injured, or get sick, or that kind of thing? So when I had to choose holidays, I always steered for really safe, boring stuff. And that's something that I always wanted to do, but never got the chance to. And I think people who know me will think that that's a really surprising answer because I'm not someone who is known to like walking long distances. Probably the reason I like skating. But maybe that's the reason why I've always wanted to do it, is because it's probably the ultimate of walking. And I just want to see and hear it's beautiful.
BEN WATERWORTH: I like it. I just to let you know, Denny's answer was Speed Skate, become a doctor and have five kids. So busy man. Yeah, your favourite thing to do in the summer is?
DANIEL GREIG: In Linescape, by far.
BEN WATERWORTH: Good answer. Your favourite movie is?
DANIEL GREIG: Well, it changed recently. It's now Interstellar.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, nice.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, because I thought that was fantastic.
BEN WATERWORTH: What was it before Interstellar?
DANIEL GREIG: It was Steven Spielberg's AI.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, yeah, that's a good map. It's been a long time. I remember that. That was a good one.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, it's kind of been forgotten. And I think it was probably a little bit ahead of its time in terms of sci-fi.
BEN WATERWORTH: It was meant to be a Kubrick film, wasn't it? And then Spielberg picked it up because Kubrick died. So that was, I think, he took his vision and turned it. I always got that confused with Bicentennial Man. They came about the same time.
DANIEL GREIG: Oh, yeah.
BEN WATERWORTH: Similar, like Robin Williams versus Jude Law and Hayley Joel Osment, wasn't it? Yeah, it was Jude Law.
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah. But I would have to give, like, always in the second place is Gattaca.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, yes. Wow. Giving some good movies here. I see a sci-fi theme here.
DANIEL GREIG: It's definitely, I'm a huge sci-fi nerd, but Gattaca is also probably the most inspirational film I think I've ever seen. Great. That whole story of overcoming physical limits to do something amazing. If anyone wants to really...
BEN WATERWORTH: You can see by the three posters behind me, my inspirations come from dinosaurs, you know, laser sword battles and James Bond. So that's where I go through there. Now, I'm going to change this one up. The original question here is, your favourite place to visit in Canada, but let's make this an Australian question. Your favourite place to visit in Australia is?
DANIEL GREIG: Is, Cairns.
BEN WATERWORTH: Ah, yes. Beautiful place.
DANIEL GREIG: Love the rainforest.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yep. I'm guessing done the reef multiple times as well or?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, I've only done the reef once. Only done the reef once, but I'm more of a rainforest appreciator.
BEN WATERWORTH: Nice. Good answer. Your favourite cartoon to watch growing up was?
DANIEL GREIG: Tom and Jerry.
BEN WATERWORTH: Good one.
DANIEL GREIG: Good one.
BEN WATERWORTH: The movie, was it a movie recently? Wasn't there a Tom and Jerry movie recently as well?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, I didn't watch it though. I didn't want to be disappointed.
BEN WATERWORTH: Yeah, probably. Probably save yourself from there. If you had to do karaoke, what song would you sing?
DANIEL GREIG: Rocket Man.
BEN WATERWORTH: Hey, yes. Good song. I like it. If I was more prepared, I would just, you know, cue it up right now. But hey, we ain't got time for that. And the final one here for you, Daniel. If you could be an Olympian in any other sport besides your own, what would it be?
DANIEL GREIG: BMX.
BEN WATERWORTH: BMX. Nice.
DANIEL GREIG: I think that's a fantastic sport, yeah.
BEN WATERWORTH: Bit of Logan Martin action going on there.
DANIEL GREIG: I think it doesn't get nearly enough appreciation as a summer Olympic sport that has real, like, that's real good for spectators.
BEN WATERWORTH: Completely agree. Absolutely agree. Just seeing here, Denny, again, can't make his mind up. He's written mountain biking, volleyball, badminton, and squash. Not even an Olympic sport, Denny. Come on. Should be an Olympic sport, let's be honest, but it's not. So, there you go.
DANIEL GREIG: Hands on these things anyway.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, look, we're very connected here at Off The Podium. We have our friends. Simply on their website, before Pyeongchang and Rio, they actually, like, kind of put a whole list of athletes. They sadly didn't do it for Tokyo, so I don't know if they're going to be doing it for Beijing. But I will say that this one is the most, generally most athletes have the same questions, but this one's the most different one. Some of these questions I've never asked on this show before, so it's good to see some. I might use Denny's more often. I like these kind of changing up the questions a little bit. Before we let you go, Daniel, people who want to stay up to date with yourself, your journey, anything else out there, can they follow you on social media or plug anything else out there that you want to give our listeners a chance to check you out on?
DANIEL GREIG: Yeah, well, I would say, yeah, obviously follow me. I'm most active on Instagram, at Greg Daniel. I'm going to be releasing something soon, which is my software startup. I'm going to be starting to make that more public. And it's also a bit of a passion project because it's got to do with a little bit to do with sport, a little bit to do with health. People can get a little bit of an idea of what that is by going to http://copilot.fit, where it's kind of a bit of an AI predictive analytics software platform that's geared to anyone who's looking to improve human performance because that's just what I'm obsessed with. And if I can't do it through sport anymore, then I'm going to do it through business. And that's where people are going to be able to find me or see me in the future. Great.
BEN WATERWORTH: Well, we'll keep an eye on that. Daniel, it's been such a pleasure to chat with you. I'm really looking forward to working with you through my speed skating career and helping you get me to the 2026 and 2030 Olympics out there. And I should say thank you for your time. I realise things are very busy for you right now in the midst of promoting No Time To Die, but you have been a pretty decent James Bond. Not my favourite, number five out of six, but that's not the worst. So I appreciate what you have given to the role of James Bond and all the best for all your movie roles moving forward as well.
DANIEL GREIG: You're welcome. Thank you very much.
BEN WATERWORTH: Massive, massive thanks to Daniel for his time. As I said, fifth favourite, James Bond. Still a very good James Bond, but definitely not my favourite. And very much looking forward to seeing what he does after his role as James Bond. And also that speed skating stuff was pretty fascinating too. I'm very excited to be able to finally find my sport, now knowing that there are legitimately no long track speed skaters in Australia at all. That is actually kind of incredible to think about that. So maybe if I don't quite make it to Milan in 2026, there's every opportunity out there for some budding speed skaters listening to this right now to have a chance to represent your country at Olympic Games in only a matter of years time. So big thanks to Daniel for his time there. Fascinating, fascinating chat. In the meantime, we are very close to episode 200. And matter of fact, that's our next episode. You're gonna hear another clip show in our next episode going over the best bits from episodes 151 right through 199. Very excited to relive all those memories with you. And we are so close to Beijing. You can sniff it. It's just around the corner. You know that's gonna mean daily coverage during those Beijing Olympics. Colin, myself and Jarrod coming to you for all the fun of the real Olympics. We're so excited for the real Olympics and very much going to be busy, busy people throughout those games. If you don't wanna miss a single one of those episodes, you should subscribe to us on all good podcasting platforms, of course. Simply search Off The Podium wherever you listen to your podcasts. Leave some feedback. We always do appreciate the ratings as well. And also stay up to date with us on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. If you know how to find us, search Off The Podium. You can either hit that like or follow button, and you will never miss a single post, episode, or anything else in between. Massive thanks to Daniel for his time. Massive thanks to you, the listener, for tuning in to this interview. Special shout out to Jason Momoa. And remember, as always, go left.
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