From Turin to Beijing, Ireen Wüst needs no answer to the rhetorical question she once asked: “Who said I’m old?”

Gold in Turin 2006, gold in Vancouver 2010, gold in Sochi 2014, gold in Pyeongchang 2018.

Ireen Wüst had every reason to feel happy and start fighting for another gold in Beijing 2022. But what she received from her closest work team was a resignation: a few days after the success in South Korea she had to hear that she was considered too old to start a new Olympic cycle.

Instead of getting depressed, the Dutchwoman redoubled her commitment to hard work. She had Beijing 2022 in her sights.

“I wanted to show the world I wasn’t too old,” she said. “Who says I’m too old?”, Wüst recently told “The New York Times”.

On February 7, 2022, in Beijing, Wüst gave a resounding answer to all those who doubted her:

- gold in the 1,500-meter speed skating event.

- her twelfth Olympic medal, her sixth gold medal, an Olympic record

- Olympic record, with her time of 1:53.28 minutes.

Never has a skater won so many medals at the Games, never has a skater won a gold at the age of 35. And, above all, never had an athlete won individual golds at five different Winter Games.

Wüst was already part of an exclusive group of athletes at winter and summer Games, those who had won individual golds in four different editions. Now, having won it in five, she is ahead of Michael Phelps, Carl Lewis and Al Oerter.

“Of course it means a lot, but I don’t realize it yet,” Wüst said this Monday in the National Biathlon Center in Zhangjiakou, 40 miles away from Beijing. “Ask me this question again in 10 days.”

There are six others who won golds in five different Games, but all of them competed in team sports.

Wüst is the most visible face of the Netherlands’ success in speed skating. The European country won almost half of the total medals in the specialty between Sochi 2014 and Pyeongchang 2018. Specialists say that the Dutch Olympic qualifiers can be tougher and more competitive than the Olympic Games themselves.

Wüst knows about records and milestones: if this Monday she became the oldest gold medal winner in skating, in 2006 she had been the youngest Dutchwoman to win a gold medal, at only 19 years old in her victory in the 3,000 meters.

After Beijing, Wüst may have time to face another matter that is worth even more than an Olympic medal: her wedding.

Coupled with skater Letitia de Jong, she has already cancelled his wedding four times. The pandemic and the sport did not help to fulfill the plans.

But one thing is clear: Wüst had already anticipated that Beijing would be his last Games. She leaves when she wants to, with no one to tell her that she is old or that she can no longer fulfill her dreams.

Everything indicates that there will be no fifth postponement of the wedding.