Jordan Stolz‘s bid to become the first man in 32 years with three Olympic golds in long track speedskating was fading Saturday. Way ahead in the mass start, the sport’s final event at the Milan Cortina Games, was 40-year-old Jorrit Bergsma, who joined another skater in pulling away from the pack with several laps to go.
Stolz kept figuring someone else would try to reel in the leaders. No one did. Stolz was shocked. He wound up in fourth place behind the mullet-wearing Bergsma, the oldest speedskater to claim a gold at any Olympics.
“They all expected me to chase, but I wasn’t going to do that,” said Stolz, a 21-year-old from Wisconsin. “If I had chased with five laps to go, I would have just blown myself up. I thought the other guys would be a bit more hungry to do it, but I guess they didn’t want to.”
He won his first two events in Milan, the 500 meters and 1,000 meters. Then came a silver in the 1,500. After that result on Thursday, Stolz said: “I didn’t have it today. Not sure why.”
He didn’t have enough in the mass start, either.
Viktor Hald Thorup of Denmark, who moved out front with Bergsma initially, got the silver. Andrea Giovannini, who mimicked Steph Curry’s “Night night” gesture when he helped Italy beat the favored U.S. in the men’s team pursuit, was the bronze medalist, barely nudging past Stolz in a closing sprint.
“I’m really happy for Jorrit. And I’m really happy for Viktor. Other than that, I don’t have anything that’s printable. The stupidest race I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Stolz’s coach, Bob Corby. “The whole peloton decided, like, ‘Well, let’s race for the bronze medal.’ So dumb.”
Ben Curtis / AP
Ahead of these Olympics, there had been a lot of talk about whether Stolz might end up with a quartet of golds, and he was asked questions about that at news conferences immediately following his two wins. The last male speedskater to get three golds in speedskating at a single Winter Games was Johann Olav Koss at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics.
“Well, it’s just wonderful to have two golds and a silver,” Corby said. “Almost accomplished everything that we wanted to do. If he would have won the 1,500, I wouldn’t have cared anything about the mass start.”
Stolz offered a similar assessment of his second trip to the Olympics; he had results of 13th and 14th at the 2022 Beijing Games when he was 17.
“I thought it was pretty successful: Two golds and a silver, that’s pretty good,” he said. “There’s some things that could have been better, but overall I’m pretty happy with it.”
Bergsma added this gold to his bronze in the 10,000 meters earlier in Milan. He now has a total of five Olympic medals, including a gold in the 10,000 way back in 2014.
The gold in the women’s mass start also went to a Dutch skater: reigning world champion Marijke Groenewoud, who hadn’t finished better than seventh in her other three races. Ivanie Blondin of Canada was the silver medalist for the second Games in a row, followed by Mia Manganello of the U.S. with the bronze.
Blondin helped Canada win a second consecutive team pursuit gold earlier at these Olympics. The 36-year-old Manganello, this season’s World Cup champion in the mass start, took a victory lap with a U.S. flag after the final race of her career.
Bergsma and Thorup left the rest of the men’s field behind in the 16-lap race.
Eventually, Bergsma went out in front alone, with enough of a lead that he could coast home during the final backstretch, pausing to spread his arms wide, pump his fists overhead and blow kisses to the sizable group of Dutch spectators at the Milano Speed Skating Stadium.
Later, waiting to walk out to the podium for the medal ceremony, Bergsma turned to Giovannini and said about the race: “I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Is this really happening?'”
Stolz, meanwhile, couldn’t really understand what had transpired, either.
“I guess you just have to expect the unexpected from what people are going to do. Like in the mass start, you would think that they would want to chase more to try and to catch Jorrit, being that I already have two gold medals and the guys who are the gold medal favorites in the mass start didn’t want to chase,” Stolz said. “So, yeah, I wouldn’t have expected that.”
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