Skating in the first pair, Annouk van der Weijden raced to a time of 6:54.17, shaving two seconds off her personal best and taking the lead. She retained it until the fourth pair, where Esmee Visser, in a consistent race lapping in the low 32 seconds, posted a time of 6:50.23. This, too, was a personal best - over 6 seconds faster than her second-place time at the 2018 Dutch Olympic qualifying tournament,[4] and a marked improvement over her season-start PB of 7:14.xx. In the last pair, Martina Sáblíková, recently recovered from a protracted back injury that hamstrung her preparations for the Olympics, skated to a silver medal time of 6:51.85; direct competitor Natalya Voronina took the bronze medal position, surpassing van der Weijden's time by 0.19s and nudging her off the podium into fourth place. Five-time Olympic gold medalist and the Olympic record holder at this distance Claudia Pechstein — now 45 years of age — came home in eighth place.
In the victory ceremony, the medals were presented by Sam Ramsamy, member of the International Olympic Committee, accompanied by Choi Jae-seok, ISU Speed Skating Technical Committee member.
Records
Prior to this competition, the existing world, Olympic and track records were as follows.
^"Venues". www.pyeongchang2018.com/. Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Organizing Committee for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Archived from the original on 17 February 2018. Retrieved 16 December 2017.
