- Speed skater Jordan Stolz has dominated the sport since the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
- Stolz could potentially win four gold medals at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina.
- His success is attributed to a combination of strong technique and a heavy weight training program.
- Stolz holds the world record in the 1,000 meters and has swept the sprint distances at recent world championships.
MILWAUKEE — Jordan Stolz was too quiet.
He’d taken an iPad to his room, and it was well past the time when he should have come back out with it. Stolz and older sister Hannah weren’t allowed on screens much and, when they were, it was for a limited amount of time.
Stolz’s father, Dirk, figured his son was playing games or watching videos. Instead, when he entered Stolz’s room, he found his son staring intently at the screen, rewinding something over and over.
It was a clip of Russian speed skater Pavel Kulizhnikov, who’d just set the world record in the 500 meters.
“He said, ‘I’m trying to figure out how to get the world record,’” Dirk Stolz recalled to USA TODAY Sports.
Stolz was not yet 12.
A decade later, Stolz not only has a world record — he broke Kulizhnikov’s previous mark in the 1,000 meters in 2024 — he has an almost unbreakable hold on men’s speedskating.
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He has won every 1,000 and 1,500-meter race this World Cup season, and five of the nine 500-meter races. This after he swept the sprint distances at the world championships in 2023 and 2024, and won the season title at all three distances last season.
After putting the mass start back on his international schedule for the first time since junior worlds in 2023, Stolz finished on the podium in two of the first four World Cups, including a win in Hamar, Norway, in December.
Stay healthy, and Stolz could leave the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milano Cortina with four gold medals, etching himself into Olympic history. Only Eric Heiden has won more medals at a single Winter Games, famously winning five as he swept the speedskating events at the 1980 Games in Lake Placid.
Norwegian biathlon great Ole Einar Bjørndalen (2002) and Soviet speed skater Lidiya Skoblikova (1964) are the only athletes to win four golds at a single Winter Olympics.
“Sometimes you just sit back and realize what level you’re actually on and it’s kind of amazing,” Stolz told USA TODAY Sports. “I don’t want to say too much about it, because you want to try and keep realistic. So I just focus on what’s ahead.
“But if you look at all the stuff that has been done, it’s kind of large.”
Jordan Stolz’s Olympic journey began on backyard pond
Stolz grew up in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, a northwest exurb of Milwaukee. He and Hannah were captivated watching Apolo Anton Ohno at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, and begged their parents to let them try speedskating.
There’s a pond on the family’s property, so Dirk Stolz cleared off a 30-yard straightaway.
“It was fun for them to go crashing into the snowbank,” Dirk Stolz said.
That straightaway soon became a full oval, and Dirk Stolz added lights so the kids could keep skating after it got dark.
“They were down there all the time,” he said.
When it was clear this wasn’t a passing fad, Jane and Dirk Stolz looked for a speedskating club for their children. Which isn’t hard to find in Wisconsin, long the epicenter for the sport in the U.S.
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Heiden, Bonnie Blair, Dan Jansen, Shani Davis — all either grew up in Wisconsin and/or trained at what is now the Pettit National Ice Center in West Allis, 10 minutes west of downtown Milwaukee.
It was at the Pettit that Stolz and his sister caught the eye of Bob Fenn, Davis’ coach.
“Bobby comes up to me and Jane and was like, ‘I want to coach your kids. Your kids have such a work ethic. They’re such go-getters,’” Dirk Stolz said.
Given their kids’ enthusiasm for the sport, the Stolzes decided to go all-in. The kids began home schooling so they could train. Jane and Dirk Stolz alternated their work schedules, Jane on the day shift, Dirk on the night shift, so there would always be someone available to make the 45-minute drive to the Pettit Center. They turned competitions into mini-vacations, staying at hotels with water parks.
Though Hannah Stolz stopped speedskating as a teenager, Stolz became even more committed.
“The technique aspect and constantly being able to improve and go faster,” Stolz said of why he loves the sport. “The feeling of hitting a turn at 40 miles per hour, you can’t get that feeling doing anything else.”
After Fenn died unexpectedly in 2017, Davis coached Stolz for about a year. But when Davis left to train China’s speedskaters, the then-14-year-old called Bob Corby, who had once coached Jansen and Blair.
Corby, a physical therapist, had treated Stolz for a pulled hip flexor two years earlier.
“He said, ‘I don’t have a coach. Would you please coach me?’” Corby said.
New coach, new regimen changes career trajectory
Stolz has always had great technique, as well as an ability to instantaneously make corrections. He is obsessive about getting better. When Jane Stolz would record her son’s races on her phone, he’d immediately grab it afterward to search for where he could save a millisecond or two.
Until he started training with Corby, however, Stolz had done minimal offseason training. Biking mostly. (He was only 14, after all.) So Corby developed a strength training program for Stolz, one that emphasizes heavy weight training.
“When I was coaching in the early ‘80s, we could skate technically better than everyone in the world, but we couldn’t beat them,” Corby said. “It occurred to me, we weren’t strong enough.”
The stronger a speed skater is in the thighs and glutes, the more power they can generate and the faster they will go. Heiden was famous for his lower-body strength, running or skate-walking with a sandbag on his shoulders to build up his leg muscles.
The exact amount Stolz lifts in the offseason is something of a trade secret, but suffice to say even Olympic weightlifters would be impressed. Pair that with pristine technique, and you have a speed machine.
“I’ve never seen anybody generate speed like he does,” Corby said. “He’s got extremely strong legs. Then, when you add really, really good technique that puts power into the ice, it’s a really good combination.”
Though COVID wiped out what would have been their first competitive season together, it gave Stolz more time to get stronger.
“That’s when he really took off,” Corby said.
At the U.S. championships in January 2021, Stolz won the 500 meters. He was 16. He made his first Olympic team the next year, finishing 13th in the 500 meters and 14th in the 1,000 at the Beijing Games.
But the experience was invaluable. The 17-year-old was on his own at those Games, with neither Corby nor his family able to go because of the strict COVID protocols. He didn’t really know how to manage jet lag, and didn’t bring any of his own food with him.
“This time around, I think I’m a bit more experienced,” Stolz said. “I’ve gotten stronger. My technique has gotten better. I feel like everything overall has improved, and it’s shown in the times.”
Indeed, speedskating hasn’t been the same since.
Just how dominant has Stolz been since Beijing Olympics?
Nine months after the 2022 Olympics, Stolz became the youngest man to capture an individual World Cup race, winning both the 1,000- and 1,500-meter races. A month later, he made the podium in three races — the 500, 1,000 and 1,500 meters — at the same World Cup for the first time.
He won the three sprint distances at the 2023 junior world championships, then did the same thing a month later at the senior worlds. It made him the youngest world champion, and first man to win three golds at a single world championships.
Stolz duplicated that feat the following year and then won the World Allround Speed Skating Championships, a prestigious event that tests skaters at the short, middle and long distances. At 19, he was the youngest skater to win it since Heiden, who was 17 when he won the first of three consecutive titles.
“I remember watching Heiden,” Dirk Stolz said, a note of awe in his voice. “This kid is getting compared to one of the greatest Olympic athletes? How did this happen?”
Why these Olympics could be transformational
Those kind of comparisons, and the expectations they bring, could send any athlete sideways. So, too, the glare of the spotlight. Stolz is featured heavily in NBC’s promotions for the Olympics — he’s alongside Hollywood heartthrob Glen Powell in one ad — and is showing up in commercials for big-name brands like Honda, Omega and Ralph Lauren.
If he does win multiple golds in Milano Cortina, it could catapult him to a level of superstardom that transcends sports, that rarefied air that Michael Phelps and Simone Biles occupy.
Stolz is not daunted by this. He is extremely confident without being cocky, recognizing that hard work, not luck, is what got him here, and continued hard work is what will be required for continued success.
“I just try and keep realistic,” Stolz said. “We know what we’re doing that’s working to make me faster. So I think if we continue to do that, it’ll continue to progress.
“I try not to get too far ahead of it or think like, ‘Oh, I’m going to skate this time next year.’ I just kind of try and see where it ends up,” Stolz added. “I know if I get stronger in the summer, good chances are you’re going to be faster in the winter.”
It helps that Stolz has gotten a taste of the limelight that awaits when he’s traveled to the Netherlands, where speedskating is a national obsession. It helps even more that, in addition to his family and Corby, his support group includes Davis, a two-time Olympic champion whose career was marked as much by missteps as medals.
The two remain close, with Davis describing Stolz as a little brother, and Davis does not hesitate to shoot Stolz straight in a way no one else can. He will never give Stolz better than a six out of 10 after a race, knowing it will encourage the younger skater to stay hungry. He counsels Stolz to be careful with what he says and does, knowing all too well that the court of public opinion does not give do-overs.
“I didn’t have an adviser that knew the information that I needed, and I was always kind of learning things the hardest way possible,” Davis said. “I wish I had had somebody like that, but it makes me want to advise and help just for that very reason alone.
“Hindsight’s 20-20, but if I could have done things a little bit better, maybe I would’ve had slightly better results,” said Davis, who won a gold and a silver at both the 2006 and 2010 Olympics.
“I’m just happy to be in the position I’m in, to give back from what I’ve experienced and what I worked for,” Davis added. “I can see him picking up where I left off and even pushing the bar further.”
That is what’s most astounding. Or, if you’re Stolz’s competitors, most terrifying.
At 21, Stolz’s career is just beginning. Even if he’d win four golds in Milano Cortina, he can, and almost certainly will, get better.
“You kind of get addicted to improving the times and trying to go faster,” Stolz said. “It’s something you have to learn or grow into, but I really like it.”
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.