Winter Olympics 2026: Brittany Bowe’s brilliant run ends with a ‘heartbreaking’ third fourth-place finish

MILAN — Some athletes measure their Olympics duration in seconds. Others, like Brittany Bowe, measure in decades.

Bowe took her final laps as an Olympic speed skater on Friday afternoon in Milan. She received an ovation from the heavily pro-Netherlands crowd at the speed-skating arena, though her head-to-head rival Antoinette Rijpma-de Jong received a louder one. Bowe sprinted off the starting line, and at the 300m mark was 0.69 seconds ahead of the leaders’ pace. That mark stayed at 0.46 seconds at 700m, and just 0.17 at 1100m. But she steadily began losing pace, and she crossed the line 0.55 seconds behind the lead time.

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Rijpma-de Jong won gold with a time of 1:54.09, Norway’s Ragne Wiklund took silver, and Canada’s Valérie Maltais claimed bronze. Bowe would go on to finish fourth overall, missing out on the podium by 0.30 seconds. It’s the third fourth-place finish for Bowe at these Games.

“I am tired of fourth-place finishes,” Bowe said. “Finishing fourth place three times this Olympics is heartbreaking.

“We are all out here trying to get on that podium. To see my pair finish first and to see the gap between myself and not just a podium finish, but the top spot, is tough as a competitor.”

And yet, Bowe embodies the Olympic ideal for four separate Games now. She’s won two medals. She carried the flag of the United States into the Opening Ceremony at Beijing in 2022.

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Bowe is one of those athletes who can seemingly do anything well. She was a championship-winning inline skater before she switched over to ice … oh, and she also played basketball for Florida Atlantic for four years, averaging 12.2 points per game her senior year. Bitten by the Olympics bug after seeing inline friends skate in Vancouver in 2010, she laced up the blades, and American Olympic speed skating was never the same.

She debuted in Sochi in four events, finishing as high as sixth in team pursuit and eighth in the 1000m. Four years later, she claimed a bronze in team pursuit, and her individual finishes were as high as fourth in the 1000m. She added her first individual medal in Beijing, winning bronze in the 1000m.

Bowe also carried the flag in Beijing, but like almost all other athletes at those Games, she was alone, cut off from family and friends and competing in empty arenas because of COVID restrictions. That inspired her to make one more run at an Olympics … and, naturally, she qualified for Milan, too.

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“After Beijing I was really determined to go four more,” Bowe said earlier during these Games. “I’m really blessed to be able to walk away on my own terms, because not everybody gets to do that. I knew I was going to dedicate four more years of my life, and here we are. It’s gone by in the blink of an eye.”

The Olympics run has paid off in other ways for Bowe. She met Team USA forward Hilary Knight eight years ago in Pyeongchang. Earlier this week, the two got engaged, just before Knight scored the crucial late-game equalizer in America’s gold medal win over Canada:

That’s been the highlight of this year’s Games for Bowe, who ended up fourth in the 1000m following a spectacular skate by the Netherlands’ Jutta Leerdam. She and her teammates ended up in fourth place in the team pursuit event, nudged off the podium by Japan by a margin of 3.5 seconds.

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“Speed skating has shaped me into the person I am,” she said after her final Olympic skate. “So it is so sad, but it is also so great that I am able to finish on my own terms, because a lot of athletes do not have that opportunity.

Her fans have given themselves a name — The Bowe-lievers — and on Friday, they were loud indeed. “We have Bowe-lievers in all 50 states and around the world,” Bowe said. “That support does not go unnoticed.”

Nor will Bowe’s stellar career.