Olympic Speedskating Great Apolo Ohno Breaks Down How Jordan Stolz Became So Dominant

At just 21, Stolz owns seven world championship gold medals.

Jordan Stolz has a hotly anticipated Olympics ahead of him. | Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

If you blinked, you could have missed American speedskater Jordan Stolz at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. He competed in two events—the 500 meters and 1,000 meters—and finished 13th and 14th, respectively.

Stolz will not be able to fly under the radar at the 2026 Games in Italy. He enters having dominated this four-year cycle, with seven world gold medals to his name between the World Allround Championships and World Single Distance Championships.

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Speaking with Sports Illustrated on behalf of the Factor Gold Collection on Tuesday, Olympic speedskating great Apolo Ohno—an eight-time medalist between the Salt Lake City, Turin and Vancouver Games in 2002, 2006 and 2010—shared his insights into Stolz’s rise.

“Jordan found his groove, really, in the past three years. There's this interesting thing that occurs in in speedskating, where sometimes you'll see a younger athlete performing, and he or she may not actually show themselves to be something that we would think to be spectacular. And then there's this shift that occurs,” Ohno said, attributing that shift in part to age and in part to gaining “a feel for the ice.”

In the case of Stolz—a native of West Bend, Wisc., who grew up admiring Ohno—the result of that quantum leap has been history. No man had won three individual gold medals in the World Single-Distance Championships until Stolz did it in the Netherlands in 2023—then he did it again in Calgary in 2024. No man had won 18 consecutive World Cup races, which Stolz did in 2025 to set a record.

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Each of these feats have built on each other, and have made Stolz a contender for serious hardware in `26.

“They start to taste what it feels like to win, and they want more of that. And they start training harder, and they get more serious,” Ohno said. “He’s been a phenom. He's been really spectacular. So genetically, he is a complete, amazing athlete. He was built to be a speed skater.”

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