No one could compete with Nils van der Poel when it was time for the 10,000 meter race in the second round of the World Cup.

He took home the victory with a margin of 17.16 seconds and thus snagged a Swedish quota place for the Olympics.

But he himself was not entirely convinced that the Olympic ticket was secured.

- I think so.

Surely it is?

Damn good, he says to SVT Sports reporter and smiles broadly.

Do you have such poor control?

- I do not really trust my own analysis of rules, van der Poel explains and shines.

However, the Swede was pleased when he received confirmation.

- It's fun of course.

This is where I fucked it up four years ago when I wanted to run 10,000 at the Olympics.

"It affected me a little"

Nils van der Poel believes that there are many skaters who are not really able to ride fast on the ice in Stavanger.

- We did some workouts here this week and those workouts basically indicated that we would finish at 12.40 here.

But then it becomes difficult to believe it when the competitors go in in 13 minutes, 12.50 high.

So it affected me a little bit and I went defensive in the beginning.

After that, however, it went well and he broke the track record with a time of 12.38,928.

On the spot, the star had great support from loved ones.

- It's hilarious.

I did not know that the cousins ​​would come, I saw them on the warm-up.

"We'll go some more"

After the competition, he also received the Oscar statuette, the Norwegian prize that is awarded every year for outstanding achievements in skating.

- There are many strange sports prizes where you have to choose if you are better at skating than Armand Duplantis is at pole vault.

But this is actually our industry award, there's something cool about it.

You do not need to go to more World Cup competitions now.

How do you think about that?

- We'll go some more, actually.

The idea was not to do that, but to get a good ranking in the Olympics and start late in the competition, we will do more.

We may sacrifice some training hours with the trips, but on the other hand, when we come to the Olympics we will compete on a track that we never did.

Then we would like to have some time to go so as not to get lost.