Dutch speed skating team the most dominant team at these Winter Olympics

GANGNEUNG, South Korea — If the United States had won as many medals per capita at these Winter Olympics as the Netherlands, the American team would have racked up 247 (instead of nine) already — and there are only 306 on offer — after eight days of action.

The Dutch are superhuman when it comes to these Games, sitting in fourth place in the overall medal count with 13 despite a population of 17 million, making it the 67th most populous in the world.

The reason is predominantly one sport, long track speed skating, in which the Dutch are so overwhelmingly good that everyone else is racing for silver. People have taken to telling each other that there is only one rule you need to remember out at the Oval, that the athlete in orange always wins.

“They are unbelievable,” Carlijn Schoutens, a United States team member who grew up in the Netherlands, told USA TODAY Sports. “The sport is incredibly popular and everyone watches it, you have a lot of kids skating from a young age and you get great athletes who want to go into it.”

The level of hegemony is so complete it is almost absurd. Not content with claiming 23 of 36 medals in Sochi four years ago, the heroes from Holland have gotten busy plundering sacks full of precious metal again.

Every single gold medal has gone to a Dutch team member except for one. They have won the men’s 1,500-meter and the 5,000, and the women’s 1,000, 1,500, 3,000 and 5000. The last of those went to a skater, Esmee Visser, who didn’t even think it would be worth trying to qualify for the Olympics a few months ago, but decided to give it a shot and ended up with gold. Visser beat a series of much more highly-credentialed competitors to emerge as the latest Dutch skater to triumph.

“It is amazing,” Visser said. “It is very surprising for me.”

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What’s amazing and surprising is that the biggest story of the Games in the Netherlands isn’t the amount of events their skaters have won, but the single one in which they lost.

The unexpected collapse of Sven Kramer, arguably the greatest skater in history, stunned fans back in his homeland.

Why are they so good? For a start, the Dutch, the tallest people on earth, are built for a sport that favors rangy-limbed athletes. Furthermore, it is a national obsession second only to soccer, with professional teams and a well-oiled infrastructure. Katie Couric was embarrassingly off base when she said on air earlier in the Games that Dutch people routinely skated to work, on frozen canals no less. Presumably with a tulip tucked behind one ear while eating a piece of Gouda cheese and en route to a pot café, right?

Yet skating is ingrained in the culture and it shows. Out of the 43 golds the Netherlands has claimed in Winter Olympic history, 41 came at long track. Of 123 total medals, 116 were on the Oval.

Speed skating is not always at the forefront of media attention so, as far as the American audience is concerned, the Dutch go quietly about their business, albeit to the tones of the colorful brass supporters’ band that can be found at the venue each day.

In 2014, international skating chiefs implemented new rules aimed at creating more parity, but they’re not working. The winner of that 10,000 when Kramer ran out of steam — Ted-Jan Bloemen, now representing Canada but born and raised in the place where they don’t really skate to work but they do know how to win, over and over again.