The speed part of speedskating isn’t the easiest thing to translate to a TV screen.
When men and women race in the 100-, 200- and 400-meter sprints at the Summer Olympics, their raw athletic prowess is obvious. It pops through a broadcast. Legs pumping and arms churning, eight racers dart their hearts out mere feet from one another as a sea of humanity of tens of thousands strong shrieks from their guts. It’s obvious and irresistible theater, and the speed (thanks to advanced technology and cameras that move alongside the sprinters) is tangible even while watching from the comfort of your couch.
Speedskating — sprinting’s Winter Olympics analog — doesn’t carry that widespread appeal every four years, when it gets a February main-stage moment. The skaters look fast, but how fast are they really going? It can be hard to discern. And they’re on skates, after all, so the training and endurance that it takes to be an Olympic-level competitor is somewhat muted because they’re zipping around on ice. Beyond that, racers don unitards with hoods over their heads (for aerodynamics) and wear protective goggles, too.
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Fair or not, it’s hard for speedskating to cultivate most of its best into highly marketable athletes who can truly break into the mainstream.
Jordan Stolz might be too great to be held back, though.
Niche sport be damned, the United States looks like it has its next Olympic superstar. The 21-year-old from Wisconsin made his 2026 Olympic debut on Wednesday in Milan and exceeded the considerable hype that trailed in his wake going into these Games.
Stolz took gold in the 1,000-meter race, and as if that wasn’t enough, he did it in both come-from-behind fashion and record-setting style. Stolz’s superhuman strength is how he doesn’t wear down as races go on. As other elite speedskaters see their times unavoidably weighted by critical seconds the deeper they get into their races, Stolz’s endurance is a phenomenal separator.
Watch how he used his abilities to take gold on Wednesday.
Stolz’s 1:06.28 blitz was .50 seconds ahead of his chief rival, Jenning de Boo from the Netherlands.
Like so many speed contests in the Olympics, the difference in first vs. second or second vs. third can be one, two or three-hundredths of a second. Stolz’s time was a laughable half-second faster than de Boo’s, marking the largest gap between a gold and silver Olympics finish in the 1,000 since 1984.
Stolz also broke the previous Olympic record by almost a full second. He didn’t set the world record on Wednesday, though. And that’s OK. He already has that, too. He set it at the world championships in January 2024.
Get ready, because Wednesday was the start of what could be an all-time Olympic career for a guy who grew up with a huge pond in his backyard, would practice deep into the frigid, black winter nights and is already turning his origin story into a quintessential Olympic fairytale.
If you missed Stolz’s race in real time on Wednesday, that’s understandable. It was in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the work week. NBC will re-air it on Wednesday night. Make the time to watch, because this is your official announcement to get on the Stolz train. He’s got one gold and is going for four.
Still to come for Stolz: the 500-meter, 1,500-meter and the must-see chaos race that is the mass start.
He may well leave Milan with four medals around his neck, and they could all be first-place finishes.
He’s practically already at the Michael Phelps, Katie Ledecky level in that it would be stunning to see him finish in any place other than the top podium position. That’s because Stolz claimed first in the world championships in 2023 and 2024 in the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 meters. Everyone on the ice fears him.
And he is unquestionably the biggest breakout star of these Winter Olympics.
The sport has had some legends over the decades, to be sure. Eric Heiden changed American speedskating forever when he won five golds at the 1980 Olympic Games in Lake Placid. Bonnie Blair, Apolo Ohno and Shani Davis reached the pinnacle in the ensuing decades.
Stolz is next, and is poised to perhaps be the greatest to ever do it. He gets his next chance at a legacy-defining Olympics with the men’s 500-meter race on Saturday.
