Two races, two golds: Jordan Stolz smashes another Olympic record in 500m

The men’s 500m is speed skating distilled to its most unforgiving form: one and a quarter laps of the oval, no pacing, no recovery window, no margin for technical compromise. On Saturday afternoon in Milan’s western suburbs, Jordan Stolz mastered the sport’s fastest and most unpredictable race and pushed his Olympic campaign toward historic territory.

The 21-year-old American won the 500m in an Olympic-record 33.77 seconds, securing his second gold medal of the Milano Cortina Olympics and adding pace behind what is rapidly becoming one of the defining individual campaigns of these Winter Games.

It also means Stolz has opened these Games with two races, two gold medals and two Olympic records.

In a final that rewrote the record book, the entire podium finished below the previous Olympic record of 34.32sec. Stolz led the way in 33.77sec, followed by the Netherlands’ Jenning de Boo in 33.88sec and Canada’s Laurent Dubreuil in 34.26sec. The performance was historic on multiple levels. Stolz’s time stands as the fastest 500m ever skated at sea level, while his 0.11-second winning margin marked the largest gap in a single-race Olympic 500m since 1988.

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Stolz did not win through a single dominant phase. Instead, he combined an elite start, near-perfect first-corner mechanics and exceptional speed preservation down the back straight – the three components that typically separate Olympic champions from podium contenders at this distance. In modern sprint skating, where aerodynamic drag and ice friction punish even slight inefficiencies, that phase-to-phase balance is rare.

The result mattered not just because it added another medal, but because of the distance itself. The 500m was generally viewed as the toughest of Stolz’s three primary individual races: an all-out sprint from the opening push, where races are often decided by hundredths and where even generational skaters can lose control before the first corner exit.

Skating in the third-to-last of 15 heats, Stolz was paired with De Boo – who ended Stolz’s two-year world title reign at the distance last March in Hamar, Norway – in one of the afternoon’s marquee matchups. If the 1000m on Wednesday showcased Stolz’s devastating closing speed, the 500m demanded something else: immediate perfection. Stolz delivered it.

He exploded cleanly from the start, protected the first turn with his trademark low, efficient body position and carried speed through the back straight with the kind of technical stability that has defined his rise.

The victory builds directly on the platform he established earlier this week, when he won gold in the 1000m by the largest Olympic margin at the distance since 1984 – a result that immediately positioned him as the central long-track storyline of these Games.

Two races into the program, the greater historical framing is harder to ignore. The men’s record for most speed skating gold medals at a single Olympics is the five won by Eric Heiden at Lake Placid in 1980, one of the most untouchable achievements in Olympic sport. Stolz entered Milan viewed as a multi-event gold threat. With two wins already secured, the ceiling remains intact. He also joins Heiden, who was in attendance Saturday, as only the second man to complete the Olympic 500m-1000m double.

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His trajectory since Beijing has been meteoric. At 17 as an Olympic debutant, he finished 13th in the 500m and 14th in the 1000m. Four years later, he is dictating the competitive tone of the Olympic long-track program.

Raised in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, and developed at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee, Stolz has approached speed skating less like an art than a systems problem, obsessing over blade setup, ice density and aerodynamic efficiency in pursuit of what he calls “free speed”. The Milan track – a temporary Olympic venue that has already produced some of the fastest times in Olympic history – has played directly into that mindset.

The Olympic schedule now turns toward Thursday’s 1500m, where Stolz could become only the second American to win three gold medals at a single Winter Olympics. The mass start still follows later in the program. The last man to win three speed skating gold medals at a single Winter Games was Norway’s Johann Olav Koss in 1994, another historical marker now sitting within touching distance.

But if the 500m represented the event most likely to destabilize his campaign, Stolz just removed that threat. And with two gold medals already secured – and records falling around him – the possibility of a historic Olympic medal haul is unfolding in real time.