If you watch the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Games next month, 21-year-old speed skater Jordan Stolz will be a part of your life, endlessly available on your screens, one of those Olympic things that explodes into public consumption at the quadrennium, rushing from unknown to very known in two weeks or much less. You may have already seen him in commercials, an appetizer. He is scheduled to compete across the breadth of the Games, in the sprint distances of 500, 1,000, and 1,500 meters, and the chaotic mass start. His record over the past four seasons is astonishing: He made the Olympic team as a 17-year-old in 2022, won world titles in the 500, 1,000, and 1,500 at age 18 in 2023; three medals while recovering from pneumonia at the 2025 Worlds, and this year has dominated the World Cup, with 16 victories in 23 races (three non-victories coming in the mass start, the race in which he is least assured of success). He holds the world record in the 1,000 and American records in the 500 and 1,500.
During this year's World Cup Heerenveen, in the Netherlands, where speed skating is very important, he set track records in all three sprints, outrageous. (Dutch skaters have won 133 Olympic medals, 46 more than any other nation; and 48 golds, 18 more than the United States. Dutch fans watch World Cups like U.S. football fans watch the NFL Playoffs.) One night the Stolz family went to dinner and were approached by Dutch fans, one of whom asked, according to Jordan’s sister, Hannah, "Are you Jordan Stolz or are you his double?" As if such a famous person couldn't be eating a meal among them. Another night Stolz trained on an outdoor rink, where small groups of fans -- 40 or 50 in all -- ambled past and then stopped to watch, perplexed, as if Shohei Ohtani was hitting in the local batting cages on a road trip in Chicago. It is always perilous to guarantee gold medals in the needle-threading pressure of the Olympics, especially on the unforgiving surfaces of the Winter Games (ask Dan Jansen; ask Mikaela Shiffrin). But if Stolz does not leave Italy with several medals, some gold, upsets will have occurred.
And in all of this, the uninitiated might strive to understand how someone rises to such greatness in a sport and ecosystem that is largely unobserved until the Games, and again afterward. They will learn here that America's speed skating machine is assembled from disparate parts: From the fury of a giant halibut, from a little boat on the rocks in cold Alaskan water, from a trickle of cervine blood in a Wisconsin driveway. From Olympian images on screens that awakened something. From outsized thighs and outsized self-confidence kept mostly -- but not entirely -- to himself; from an eerie sense of touch between steel and ice that empowers but can betray; from a sense of where he is and what it means and where he goes afterward.
From all of it, pieces hewn across the seasons of a young life, stitched together into a sum that is not just greater than its parts, but irreplicable.
In the summer of 2014, Dirk and Jane Stolz took a July trip to Alaska, where they had been hunting together for more than two decades. The outdoors was a glue in their marriage. Dirk had emigrated to Wisconsin from Germany at age nine and first hunted in Alaska with his father while in his teens and got hooked on the vast isolation and rugged physical tests; Jane was raised in Wisconsin but traveled to visit family in the Dakotas and shot squirrels, rabbits and gophers from when she was six years old. Most on the nose in the couple’s connection: They met when Jane was a customer in a Wisconsin Dells taxidermy shop where Dirk was working.
But this trip was different: It would be the first time Dirk and Jane fished in the cold and challenging waters of Frederick Sound in Southeast Alaska, and, more significantly, the first time they brought their children -- Hannah, 12; and Jordan, 10. The kids were already experienced in the woods. They got their first bows as eight-year-olds; Jordan shot a white-tailed deer at 10. Both fished. It was a foundational part of their youth. The trip to Alaska was a graduation of sorts; Dirk had told Jane they would go together and fish when the kids were strong enough to reel in a halibut, a steep qualification that would prove thrilling, and prophetic.
They lived for two weeks in a dry cabin near the village of Petersburg, 150 miles south of Juneau on the northern tip of Mitkof Island. The cabin had no running water, no electricity, no cell service or internet -- smaller sacrifices than apparent, because the Stolz kids did not play video games and the family rarely watched television. It was an enchanting adventure, the first of several: Hannah remembers looking for shells along the beach line and Jordan recalls hikes in the deep woods. "We were in the wilderness," he says now. "You can do pretty much anything you want." Together they would catch Dungeness crab, boil it in a giant pot and eat it for dinner. The four of them fished from a 16-foot aluminum boat that was really just a big rowboat with a small motor, and Jane reminded the kids that if the boat somehow flipped over, to climb into one of the big, buoyant polyethylene coolers they carried along, because the water was barely 50 degrees and life jackets might not be sufficient.
One day the four of them fished halibut in the sound, each throwing lines into the water. Halibut are giant game fish, often reaching more than 100 pounds, and strong swimmers that make fishermen work for dinner. When an entire school came rushing past, the four of them darted from one side of the little boat to the other, chaotic. Hannah pulled in a 70-pounder, and then Jordan hooked something and dug in for the fight; his fish would screech off into the distance or shoot straight down into the blackness of the deep, 100 feet or more. Dirk, Jane, and Hannah tried to help, worried that Jordan would get pulled into the salt water. "Jordan just yelled at us," says Jane. “'Don't touch it, don't touch it! I want all the credit!’" Hilariously, the family had watched Jaws together earlier that summer.
After 45 minutes, Jordan reeled an exhausted halibut to the edge of the boat and Dirk gaffed it onboard. They took a picture -- Dirk straining to hold the giant fish, which was shaped like a flat football, colored a mottled green, almost prehistoric; towheaded Jordan in a blue fleece a size too big, dwarfed by the fish he had defeated. All of it against a grey summer sky. The halibut weighed 142 pounds; Jordan weighed 73.
They went back to Alaska the following spring, in May of 2015, this time not just to fish, but also to hunt bear by stalking from the water and then landing ashore for the chase. One day they drifted among humpback whales, one breaching nearly on top of them. Another day they mistimed the steep Frederick Sound tides, which can rise and fall more than 20 feet in a cycle. Their little boat got hung up on rocks at the mouth of a strait and together they all held it steady until slack tide (calm water between high and low tides), when they floated free and made landfall.
After the second trip, Dirk, at the time a patrolman with the Washington County Sheriff's Department, says he was confronted by a supervisor who threatened to report him to the state's child welfare agency for putting his children in danger in the Alaskan wilderness. Jane heard similar talk. To Dirk, it ran counter to his world view. "This is how [Hannah and Jordan] grew up," says Dirk, 55, who retired in 2024 after almost 30 years, some of it spent working undercover drug operations. "Don't fear anything. Just go for it."
A decade later, Jordan is talking to me on a video call screen from a small hotel room in Norway, wrapped in a long down puffer jacket that makes him look cocooned in a sleeping bag. His wispy blonde hair tries to fall in his face, but fails. The 73-pound waif who landed that big halibut is now nearly 6-foot-1 and weighs 183 pounds and is the best long track speed skater in the world. He will likely win multiple medals -- possibly multiple gold medals, although ice is slippery and nothing is promised; keep reading – at the Milan Cortina Olympics in Italy. But he remembers those trips. He remembers everything, including that some people disapproved of the parenting involved. "They didn't agree with it, because they thought it was too hardcore," he says, and then he smiles a little deviously. "I guess my family is hardcore."
There is one more story that illuminates this and the Family Stolz, and it lands harder than trips to the Alaskan wilderness. Dirk and Jane raised their children on 65 acres in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, 45 miles north of Milwaukee. Dirk had his sheriff's job and a taxidermy business in the basement of the house; Jane is a dental hygienist. They also raised deer and elk, mostly as a breeding business in which they would sell stock to others interested in populating their property with animals. The deer would roam the property and walk in and out of the home's grade-level basement, like house cats. "It's pretty cool having a tame deer walking in and out of your house," says Jordan. "Not something everybody experiences, right?"
Rarely, says Jane, animals were killed and eaten. "They were our pets," she says. "But like we explained to the kids -- you can't sell absolutely everything, you can't keep absolutely everything, and if one of [the animals] wasn't very big, we eventually have to, you know ..." (In one of our interviews, Jordan said to me, "The freezer was always full," predominantly from hunting and fishing trips in Alaska and elsewhere. He has eaten hundreds of pounds of wild game and fresh fish. "And I think it's healthy," he says. "I feel lucky to have had that [diet] available to me." (He also loves Chipotle bowls, tacking back toward mainstream).
In the spring of 2018, a deer on the Stolz property was found to have chronic wasting disease, a fatal and contagious neurological disorder. After a period of quarantine failed to halt the spread, the Wisconsin Dept. of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) ordered that the Stolzes' stock be "depopulated." On the morning of Dec. 15, DATCP killed 44 deer and 16 elk on the Stolz farm. Dirk and Jordan, who was then 14, returned home from lunch to find blood running down the driveway. "Jordan came home and saw that," says Jane, emotionally. "He saw that."
It was a third of Jordan's life ago that this happened, but he does remember. "It was messed up," says Jordan. "Because the animals were always around, and most of them weren't sick, and then they were gone. It was something you had to get used to."
Another life unfolded simultaneously, a life on ice. Last fall I watched from inside the ice oval at the Pettit National Ice Center in West Allis, Wisconsin, 20 minutes west of Milwaukee, with Stolz's 75-year-old coach, Bob Corby, a small, delightfully urgent man who was a very good-but-not-great racer and then a U.S. national team coach in the 1980s. He retired from coaching at age 34, disillusioned at both the sport's bureaucracy and his inability to guide skaters he coached to any medals at the '84 Olympics; he buried a wife who died of cancer at 46, and carried on raising their two sons while running -- and then retiring from -- a physical therapy practice. Seven years ago, 14-year-old Jordan called him, in need of a coach; his first real long-track coach (like many modern skaters, Jordan started in short-track skating), Bobby Fenn, had died of a heart attack and his next, four-time Olympic medalist Shani Davis, had left after a year to take a lucrative coaching job in China. The speed skating world is small, and Corby was known. "I'm retired, this kid calls me, and he turns out to be the greatest speed skater in the world," says Corby. "Pretty much fun for grandpa here."
On this day Corby shouted out lap splits (and wrote them in his notebook) as Stolz skated a crushing distance interval workout called a Van der Poel, after Swede Nils van der Poel, who won the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at the 2022 Olympics and retired the following spring. The session: 3x1600 meters, with 800 meters' rest in between, and then again. Long and painful. I asked Stolz before the workout if he was nervous, as athletes often are before such an effort. "Not too bad," he said, unconvincingly. Afterward he tacked on a lower-body weight session in a small room just off the ice; for speed skaters, quads and glutes are the engine, arms and shoulders just passengers to be kept light. Corby says when he sees Stolz randomly pick up a weight with his arms, as if to do a set of biceps curls, he shouts, "Drop it.” Here, Stolz does rapid-fire squats with 325 pounds, not near his max, which is ... "I'm not gonna say," says Stolz. His thighs are huge, common in his line of work.
Stolz is regarded by most media as shy or reticent. I would describe him as efficient -- drifting, waiting for moments that interest him or trigger his voice, declining small talk with strangers. Not shy. Like so many great athletes, he loves to talk about the sports he does not contest professionally but is confident he could.
Cycling: Like most good speed skaters, he is good on a bike and assaults the flatlands and small, rolling hills near his home as vital cross-training. Also dangerous. Last June 2, Stolz crashed while sprinting at 40 miles an hour on Townline Road in Kewaskum, not far from his house. His chain bounced off the front cassette just as Stolz was at the top of his stroke; he was thrown forward into a ditch and gashed open his left shin. "The bone was right there, the tendon was right there," Stolz says. "Hurt pretty bad." He was lucky to have landed mostly in grass, 20 feet short of discarded boulders, missed only a week of training and was left with a fat, maroon-colored scar. He still loves the bike and would love to someday race professionally. He imagines battling four-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar of Slovenia. "I can't match his Zone 2 [long distance] numbers," says Stolz. "Sprinting would be a different story."
Sprinting on land: Around the time of the 2024 Olympics, Stolz told people around the Pettit Center that he could beat Olympic 100-meter gold medalist Noah Lyles. "I like sprints," says Stolz, "and I know I'm fairly good at them." A year later, Stolz took time bets around the rink and then ran, to his recollection, 11.3 seconds from a standing start, in sneakers, a respectable time in those conditions, but far short of Lyles's best of 9.79. When I asked Stolz about the demonstration, he said, "Could I beat [Lyles] right now? No. But if I train? Probably? Maybe at 40 meters? I don't know." The line between commitment and whimsy is blurry here, but this is an Olympic speed skater suggesting he'd like to take on the best grand tour cyclist and the fastest man in the world. So, there is that.
We talked that day in Wisconsin about the workout, the ice, the weights. Then about the meaning of the Olympics ahead. He shrugged a little, just with his head, and said, "The future is the most important thing, right? Winning in Milan. That's everything." Maybe he believes that, maybe he thinks he's supposed to say it. Hold the thought.
In speed skating, the past is also important. And the past often points to Eric Heiden, whose mind-boggling five gold medals at Lake Placid in 1980 -- every race from the explosive 500 to the 25-lap 10,000 (still looks like a typo) -- is the sport's equivalent of DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Wilt's 100 points, or Flo-Jo's 100 meters, and who is the most seductive comp for Stolz. Heiden retired after those Games in a time when amateur rules made long careers unrealistic and became an orthopedic surgeon. He lives now in Park City, Utah, out of public life. But he watches.
In the fall, I sent Heiden a text asking to talk about Stolz.
His response: "About to head out on a bike ride. Give me a call in 2 hours and we'll talk about a speed skating superstar."
Two hours later we talked. I ask if Stolz is the best skater he's seen since, well, him. Heiden pauses and starts naming greats, as a list, then stops. "You know, never mind, I should just say very quickly, Jordan is the best I've ever seen. I mean, god, he makes it look so simple. He's got great acceleration from the start. He's got great efficiency with each stroke. He doesn't waste anything. If he's skating here [at the Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City], I'll take a day off and go to the rink just to watch him skate. I mean, god ..."
Heiden's note is delivered on down from a metaphorical speed skating mountaintop, but his reverence tracks with many others in the small world of long track, where success hinges on controlling long, sharp blades around tight corners while applying power to the ice and sustaining speed against centrifugal force and the body's impulse to drift and fall. The best skaters rely on a singular quality: Feel. Heiden had it. So did Bonnie Blair, winner of five gold medals and one bronze across three Olympics from 1988-94. Stolz has it, too.
"Jordan, he's just got this incredible feel for the ice," says Dave Cruikshank, a three-time Olympian and U.S. Speed Skating Hall of Fame member who now specializes in coaching skating technique, mostly with hockey players. (He is also married to Blair.) "He has an exceptional ability, when his foot comes down on the ice, to not just turn, but also to continue to apply pressure with his skate. Very few skaters have that kind of ability."
Corby saw it when he started coaching Stolz. "First of all, he's so strong in his lower body," says Corby. "So the amount of force he's putting into the ice is pretty phenomenal." The trick: Not letting the geometry of turns, and the brain's intuitive fear of falling sideways, diminish that force. The taller a racer stands on the turn, the more he loses power. "The more you push perpendicular to forward motion, the faster you're going to go. And Jordan, he had that ability, even before I met him. He may have just figured it out on his own, a long time ago."
Shani Davis (laughing): "He didn't figure it out on his own. We worked a lot on relaxing and being effortless. Not just smashing the skate." Stolz says, "I think I always had good feel. Shani taught me better ways, and of course, hearing it all from him made it better." The feel is both natural and learned, nature and nurture.
Carl Platt is a long-tracker who has trained with Stolz for years (on the bike, too). "I skate behind Jordan," says Platt, who narrowly missed making the Olympic team in the mass start event, "and he's not jumpy, he's smooth and efficient. And so good in the corners."
For Stolz, like for all great athletes, the perfect feel bounces from his brain to his feet and back, intuitive but also evasive. He speaks like a boy raised so near the wilderness. "Some days, you feel off," he says. "And you can't put your finger on it." (At the Olympic Trials in early January, where Stolz was guaranteed spots on the team but had to start to secure them, he fell at the start of the 1,000 meters and still finished third.) "Just didn't have the right feeling," Stolz said. "Sitting around a lot today, been cramped up, dehydrated."
It's not often like that. The other side of the feel: "When it's good," says Stolz, "you don't hesitate. Like in my first Worlds in 2023. I skated the 500 meters and I was thinking I might get third or fourth. Maybe fifth? I won by three-tenths [.36 actually]. I don't even know how I was doing it. But I was. It was just 'Here we go. Send it.'"
How does this genius take root? The Stolz origin story contains a foundational thesis: He (and his sister) fell for short-track speed skating by watching the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and, in particular, the dynamic Apolo Ohno. But they did not watch those Games entirely unbidden. Dirk grew up in the Black Forest town of Schluchsee, on a lake of the same name in southeastern Germany, where he was a youth ski racer. "When the Winter Olympics came on, I was glued," he says. "So yeah, 2010, tried to get the kids into skating."
Figure skating was aired first. "They got up and went to their bedrooms," says Jane. But then short track. "Apolo Ohno came on the screen," says Hannah. "And we were hooked. Like 'We want to skate! We want to skate!'"
So they skated. Dirk shoveled off an iced-over pond on the property and put the kids in used hockey skates. The pond was stream-fed, meaning that the ice near the stream would be thin, so Jane also put them in life jackets. Off they went, imitating Apolo, one hand on the snowy surface. In time, the Stolzes enrolled Jordan and Hannah in the Badger Speed Skating Club at the Pettit Center, where the head coach was Jeff Brand.
Jordan, undersized but willing, seized on it. "Every [short-track] practice he was just dominant," says Brand. "I had to design practices around him. He could dust every skater, even the adults. The hardest thing we had to teach skaters was rolling to the outside edge [of the skate]. It's the hardest thing to do when you're learning speed skating. It was just easy for him. Most skaters I see don't get it until they're about 17; he had it down when he was around 11."
Jordan says, "I think I just had that feel for the ice. The coaches would talk to me and I would listen, but most of the time I had no idea what they were telling me. I would just nod and then go back out and skate." It wasn't all serious. According to Brand, "Jordan could not wait for when we practiced falling, because you had to learn to fall correctly. And he loved to fall."
(A note here: Hannah was at times better than Jordan at all of these things. She is older and grew younger than Jordan, who was tiny and grew later. But in her teens, Hannah shifted to taxidermy and that is her vocation.)
As Stolz began to grow, a shift to long track was logical. (Corby says Stolz is particularly suited for the power-to-angles dynamic of the sport: "Long legs in comparison to the rest of his body, long femurs in comparison to the rest of his leg," says Corby. "Those are proven advantages.") Brand did speed skating marathons (26.2 miles, like on land), and his training was 100 laps. One morning, Jordan, age 9, tagged along with Brand and some others. "I'd look around every five laps, and he's still there," says Brand. "I can't believe this. He made 77 laps. Nine years old. Ridiculous."
Stolz did few other sports, running counter to the popular current theory that "Range" -- the title of David Epstein's bestselling book on the topic -- is better than specialization. "My father," says Jordan, "believes in the opposite of that." He liked riding his BMX bike around their spread, but that was his only serious flirtation with another sport. Evidence of his siloed talent was made public when he threw out the first pitch at a Milwaukee Brewers game in April 2023, looking very much like he had never played baseball, which he had not. Both kids were home schooled after fourth grade for Jordan, fifth for Hannah, partly because they had become disillusioned with the public school system and partly because it was more efficient for the family's schedules. Dirk and Jane made the runs to skating practice -- Dirk delivering the kids to the Pettit Center after awakening in the afternoon from his night shift, Jane later after finishing up work at a dental practice near the Pettit Center.
Stolz’s chill persona can sometimes hide an unsurprising competitiveness. Training partner Platt recalls hanging with Stolz recently, when news arrived that a young German skater had broken one of Stolz's junior records. "He was not happy," says Platt. "He doesn't want to lose his records." Stolz says, defensively, "I'm not, like, arrogant. Some people cope with pressure by being arrogant, like Dutch skaters. Say arrogant things in the media. I don't do that." (Of course, in its way, calling other skaters arrogant is in itself arrogant. More to the point, to win gold medals, Stolz will have to beat several strong skaters from a talent-deep Dutch squad, led by Jenning de Boo in the 500 and 1,000 meters, and Kjeld Nuis in the 1,500). After Stolz competed sick at last year's Worlds in Hamar, Norway, and finished third in the 1,000, the race in which he holds the world record, he sat on a changing bench and tossed his bronze medal 10 feet away.
Corby said, "It looks like you want to be as far away from that thing as possible."
Stolz said, "I'm going to tie it to the back of my bike this summer and drag it around."
There is a more distant picture. Every great American speed skater is compared to Heiden, less perhaps as time passes, but still. It is not entirely fair: The sport was wildly different in 1980. There were many all-event skaters (although none as good as Heiden), whereas today there are more specialists. Nevertheless, Heiden texted Corby last fall and wrote, paraphrasing, according to Corby, "It's been a long time since somebody won all five. Time for another one?" (Not in 2026, obviously. Stolz has not trained sufficiently for the distance events.). It was both praise of Stolz and a gentle prod at coach and skater to reach for history. Heiden stands by it: "Things are different now," he says. "You would be going up against the best in the world in every event. But I'm telling you, this guy is special."
Now Stolz sits at a table and spins a bottle of Gatorade. He studied great skaters' technique on an iPad in his bedroom before he was 10 years old. He gets it. "What Heiden did? Not this year," he says. "But another Olympics?" Pause. "I'm only 21, right?" Only 21. More races to skate, to ride, perhaps even to run. And in this way, Milan is not actually everything. It's just the next thing.
Tim Layden is writer-at-large for NBC Sports. He was previously a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for 25 years.