BEIJING — Nils van der Poel spends a lot of time thinking about the Dutch. He has come up with an explanation for why he, a Swede, and not an athlete from the sport’s unquestioned powerhouse, is the most dominant men’s distance speedskater in the world.

“We don’t have the freedom of economy that they have, but we have the freedom of authority,” he said, sounding more like a philosopher than an athlete detailing sporting success. In a week at the Beijing Games, van der Poel has gained a reputation as a deep thinker and iconoclast (“speedskating sucks,” he opined recently.)

“The con of having so much money is that you’re looking for solutions to problems that money can solve, but it’s not always the best solution,” he added.

Van der Poel’s freedom has led him to embrace lifestyle choices and training methods that do not quite seem real.

He biked from Riksgränsen south to Smygehuk, over 1,200 miles, and at one point urinated on his hands to warm them. He tried to build a cabin 20 feet up in a stand of trees. He parachuted into a ceremony in which he received a sporting honor. He ate 10 pounds of porridge before embarking on an ultramarathon. He joined the army for a year.

Van der Poel, 25, describes his motivation as a jar that must be continuously refilled so that he can take from it to continue his brutal training. “Say I attend this skydiving boogie and I have fun for the weekend, and I have two rest days every week,” he says. “How far am I willing to run Monday to Friday every week if I’m allowed do that during the weekends?”

The Dutch, he believes, do not have the time or freedom to experiment. They receive handsome salaries from professional teams and have sponsorship commitments. They must continually qualify for the Dutch championships, World Cup events and the Olympics. They must operate on a time frame of days or weeks, while van der Poel can think across months or years.

But his freedom of authority extends far beyond training. At an extraordinary news conference on Wednesday he accused the Dutch skating federation of pressuring the head ice technician at the National Speed Skating Oval to create ice conditions favorable to the Dutch skaters, an accusation the Dutch Olympic Committee and the International Skating Union denied.

His complaint could not be written off as a loser’s lament: Van der Poel won the 5,000-meter race in an Olympic record time Sunday night, defeating Dutchman Patrick Roest by half a second on the strength of a fast final three laps.

“I think it’s my moral obligation to bring it up,” he said.

On Friday, Roest will try to prevent van der Poel from winning a second gold medal when they contest the 10,000 meters. Van der Poel has owned the distance for years, and when the world’s best skaters last contested it at a World Cup event in November, van der Poel won by 17 seconds.

Van der Poel is just five months younger than Roest, and they grew up competing against each other in youth events. At the world junior championships in Warsaw in 2015, van der Poel conspired with American skater Emery Lehman to play a prank on the Dutch team. They bought fish at a gas station, tricked a receptionist and sneaked into a Dutch room.

When they arrived, they found that the mattresses were duct taped together. Written on the mirror in red lipstick was a greeting from the Norwegian team. Van der Poel and Lehman had been beaten to the prank, but that did not stop them from hiding the fish all over the room.

“The Dutch came back and it smells like fish everywhere,” van der Poel recalled, laughing. “And the Norwegians just got all the blame for it!”

Roest and van der Poel have had a professional competitive relationship, but van Der Poel’s accusations may have soured it. On Thursday Roest said he was disappointed, and suggested van der Poel made the accusation as a bit of a mind game before the 10,000.

In the 10,000, skaters must push themselves to skate just below their maximum effort, and then hold on for dear life through 25 laps. Van der Poel’s training for the event differs from most of his competitors in that it includes no strength training. Instead, in the spring and summer he does enormous amounts of low-intensity training, like those ultramarathons and bike rides.

When speedskating season arrives in the fall and winter, van der Poel switches to high-intensity training, but mostly only speedskating itself. He estimates that he has skated the 10,000 five times a week since mid-October. His goal is to “skate flat,” meaning that he tries to cover each lap at the same speed.

He skates most of those on a 250-meter oval in Trollhättan, a city of about 60,000 on the Göta älv River in western Sweden. The oval’s curves are similar to those of a standard size oval, but the straights are much shorter. That extra practice on the curves allows van der Poel to take them tighter than others skaters do, carving a more efficient line through the course.

Van der Poel believes he will win another gold medal on Friday, but he sounds sincere when he says that, despite competing in a sport where success can be defined by how you perform at the Olympics every four years, he does not believe it is healthy to be driven by athletic outcomes. “What I hold myself responsible for is I’m going to try to win as bad as I can, but I’m going to be very, very kind to myself, realizing that I will probably fail winning,” he says.

And how is he trying to win? There, for perhaps the only time, he does not have to think long and hard about how he wants to answer, or how the question connects to his sporting philosophy. When he finally races, that is when things get simple.

“We skate it like we always skate it,” he says. “We skate flat and we skate fast.”