  We investigate the singlet, triplet and colour average heavy quark free
energies in SU(2) pure gauge theory at various temperatures T. We focus on the
long distance behaviour of the free energies, studying in particular the
temperature dependence of the string tension and the screening masses. The
results are qualitatively similar to the SU(3) scenario, except near the
critical temperature Tc of the deconfining transition. Finally we test a
recently proposed method to renormalize the Polyakov loop.
