Christine Nesbitt broke the women's 1000m world record on her way to taking the lead after the opening day of speed skating's World Sprint Championships.

The championship combines two 500m and two 1000m races over two days and then converts times into points.

On the opening day in Calgary, Nesbitt was disappointed with her 500m performance but then produced a time of 1:12.68 in the 1000m to better the previous world record of 1:13.11 set by Canada's Cindy Klassen in 2006 on the same ice.

As a result, the Canadian has scored 74.040 points after the opening day which leaves her ahead of Jenny Wolf of Germany by .56 points with Hong Zhang of China third .58 behind Nesbitt.

"It felt really, really powerful and the first time this year it felt like every single stride, I felt a lot of pressure and power going into the ice," Nesbitt said.

"This was a better race than my Olympic gold-medal race, so that's really cool. I think it's probably one of biggest accomplishments to set a world record and on top of that, one of Cindy's.

"I was pretty frustrated after my 500. I thought I had a good race even though I had a slip in the first corner. Then I saw the finishing time and was not happy with it. It felt better than the time reflected.

"I was kind of going through all different scenarios in my head before the 1,000. I kind of got a little bit angry and I race well when I'm angry, so I think it was good."

Kyou-Hyuk Lee of South Korea (68.335 points) leads the men's field ahead of runner-up Dmitry Lobkov of Russia (68.505) and Stefan Groothuis of the Netherlands (68.590).

Eurosport