MILAN — Jenning de Boo remembers exactly when he knew that he had come up short again in his bid to beat American speedskating phenom Jordan Stolz.
It was when de Boo and Stolz screamed around the final corner of Saturday night’s men’s 500 meters shoulder-to-shoulder with one another.
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“My coach said that if I wanted to beat him, I had to be the first out of the last corner,” de Boo said. “At that moment I knew he was going to take the race.”
Only four days after he surged past de Boo on the final lap of the men’s 1,000 meters to claim his first gold medal of these Winter Games, Stolz won another head-to-head showdown against the Dutchman with Olympic glory at stake. He unleashed a devastating finishing kick on the final straightaway to cross the finish line in 33.77 seconds, smashing the former Olympic record and holding off de Boo by 11 hundredths of a second.
Stolz and de Boo were by far the fastest two skaters in the 500, just as they were four days earlier in the 1,000. If they had raced in the thin air of Salt Lake City rather than at sea level in Milan, American skater Cooper McLeod believes that both would have eclipsed the world record of 33.61 seconds, which has stood since 2019.
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“That’s for sure a world record in [Salt Lake City],” McLeod said. “We just watched some pretty special, historic skating. The Olympic record was lowered by almost half a second today. That doesn’t happen.”
Hands on his head in disappointment as he rounded the curve after the finish line, de Boo looked up at the scoreboard, lost his balance and careened into the barrier along the outer edge of the ice. Stolz looked back to see if de Boo was OK, then high-fived coach Bob Corby ice-side, pumped his fist and waved to the crowd.
Stolz’s victory pushed his audacious pursuit of four Olympic gold medals into more realistic territory. He is now halfway to securing the most speedskating gold medals at one Olympics since fellow Wisconsin native Eric Heiden won a mind-blowing five at the 1980 Lake Placid Games. Still remaining for Stolz are the 1,500 on Thursday and the chaotic, unpredictable mass start event two days later.
“I felt a lot less pressure today just because I got the first one out of the way,” Stolz said. “I thought, ‘This one’s not worth stressing over because it’s going to be a tossup anyway.’ It was going to be whoever skates a really clean race between me and Jenning. We both skated clean, and I was able to win.”
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For Stolz, overcoming de Boo and an array of other fast sprinters in the 500 was potentially his most significant hurdle. This was the race where Stolz was the most vulnerable, the one that kept his coach awake at night.
Whereas Stolz has dominated the 1,000 and the 1,500 since rocketing onto the global scene three-plus years ago, he is more susceptible at a shorter distance that rewards pure speed rather than speed endurance. Stolz has won five of nine 500s contested at World Cup events so far this season. Skaters like de Boo, Damian Żurek of Poland and Kim Jun-Ho of South Korea have shown the ability to beat him.
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The way that Tuesday’s 1,000 unfolded highlighted the challenge that Stolz faced. His strategy going into the race was to try to be even with de Boo at the 600-meter mark, but when the bell sounded he trailed by four tenths of a second. While Stolz threw down a blistering final lap to surge past de Boo and secure his first career Olympic gold, his mid-race deficit raised questions about how he’d fare in the 500.
“That is a concern,” Stolz’s coach Bob Corby acknowledged earlier this week in a conversation with Yahoo Sports. “What that race did is it showed that he’s probably going to have a good 1,500. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to have a good 500. And Jenning was flying, so I think he’s going to put down a fast time on Saturday.”
On the eve of Saturday’s race, after he found out Stolz would again be paired with de Boo, Corby gave Stolz some last-minute advice. Since de Boo had the inner lane over the latter half of the race, that meant the Dutchman would be stalking Stolz from behind to potentially set up a pass on the final turn.
“So the last corner starts at the beginning of the back stretch,” Corby told Stolz. “If you’re going to win the race, you’ve got to win it on the back stretch. You’ve got to burn like you’ve never burned before.”
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Stolz executed the race strategy perfectly. Corby called it “the best 500 he ever skated.”
Before the race, de Boo thought 33.88 would have been a winning time, so he emerged from his latest duel with Stolz “a bit disappointed” not to win gold.
“I think the 500 is my best distance,” de Boo said. “This is the distance I should have done it at and that didn’t happen today.
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