Each Winter Olympics produces one or two figures who come to define it. The stars whose performances transcend result sheets and medal tables and settle into memory as shorthand for the event itself. For decades, America has waited for their next one: someone capable of cutting through the noise of the crowded sports landscape and centering themselves in the national conversation.

Jordan Stolz may be him.

The 21-year-old Wisconsin native has arrived at the Milano Cortina Olympics not just as the dominant force in speed skating today, but as an athlete who could leave Italy as the face of the entire Winter Games. He already is a seven-time world champion and the favorite here across three individual distances – the 500m, 1000m and 1500m – with real medal potential in the mass start. Over the past three seasons he has tightened his grip on the sport to the point where defeats have started to register as statistical outliers rather than normal results.

If that dominance holds over the next 11 days at the Milano Speed Skating Stadium – a campaign that begins on Wednesday with the men’s 1000m – the implications stretch beyond medals into that household name territory.

Schedule

All times Eastern.

Wed 11 Feb Men's 1000m, 12.30pm

Sat 14 Feb Men's 500m, 11am

Thu 19 Feb Men's 1500m, 10.30am

Sat 21 Feb Men's Mass Start semi-finals, 3pm

Sat 21 Feb Men's Mass Start final, 4.40pm

“People have told me that, but I haven’t really thought about it,” Stolz said. “I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I can’t ever plan on something being perfect. I just have to do the best I can.”

Should he complete the 500-1000-1500 treble as he did at two of the past three world championships, Stolz would become only the second American to win more than two golds in any sport at a single Winter Games and the first since fellow speed skater Eric Heiden, whose five-gold sweep in 1980 remains one of the towering individual achievements in all of sport. A fourth gold in the mass start would place Stolz in a neighborhood almost untouched in Winter Olympic history: beside only Norwegian biathlon greats Ole Einar Bjørndalen and Johannes Thingnes Bø and Soviet speed skater Lidiya Skoblikova.

The lofty comparisons have followed Stolz for years. Heiden, for obvious reasons. Michael Phelps, for scale: an athlete capable of turning a multievent Olympic program into extended appointment television.

The attention has been building for months. NBC has positioned him prominently across its Olympic coverage and marketing, including a teaser advertisement with Hollywood actor Glen Powell that Stolz admits with a trace of frustration cost him a precious day of training to film.

For most of his career, the spotlight has been sport-specific – intense but contained, brightest inside the speed skating cathedrals like Thialf and Vikingskipet but dimming at the doors. The Olympics change the scale entirely. Athletes who may otherwise remain big in their parochial sports become global figures, their performances folded into the broader story of the Games.

Now, the stage is larger.

“I try not to think about the pressure too much,” Stolz said this week. “Once you get to the line, it’s the same thing you’ve been doing for years. Everything around you is just noise.”

* * *

It started on a frozen pond behind the family home in Kewaskum, Wisconsin – about 45 miles north of Milwaukee – where five-year-old Jordan Stolz first stepped on to the ice wearing a blue lifejacket, circling a hand-cleared oval while his parents watched from the bank.

His mother, Jane, remembers the fear more than the romance. The lifejackets stayed on until his father drilled through the surface and proved the thickness ran several feet deep. Only then did she agree to let them skate freely.

The 2010 Olympics became the exception to a house built around being outdoors. For two weeks, the TV stayed on. The kids sat and watched as the short-track star Apolo Anton Ohno won the final three of his eight Olympic medals. Speed – real speed – looked different from anything they had seen before.

In those first winters, skating wasn’t training yet. It was repetition disguised as play: laps under homemade lights, cold mornings, the slow shaping of balance and edge control long before anyone called it technique.

If the Pettit National Ice Center had not been 40 minutes away, Stolz has said, his path might have bent somewhere else entirely. Geography, as much as talent, shaped what came next.

At Pettit, the sound usually comes before the sight – the soft hiss of steel slicing fresh ice, rhythm so steady it barely sounds like effort. Then the blur: Stolz in motion, head low, shoulders still while his legs fire beneath him like piston rods.

On most afternoons, the rink is nearly empty. A few junior skaters drift toward the boards. Occasionally a parent looks up from a phone. The fastest man in the sport often trains in practical anonymity, looping the oval while American sports culture continues to treat speed skating as something that happens every four years.

In the Netherlands, Stolz is already something else. Speed skating there occupies something closer to the cultural space the NFL does in the United States. He can walk through city streets and be recognized by people who have never stepped on to a rink. In Wisconsin, he can still walk through the grocery store unnoticed. He seems comfortable living in both realities.

When he wants distance from both, he goes somewhere quieter. The Stolz family has spent summers fishing and hiking in Alaska for years. The training can be brutal – he jokes about hailstorms appearing out of nowhere – but the appeal is the isolation. No noise. No expectation. Just the work.

* * *

The first time Stolz believed the Olympics could be a realistic dream was at about 15 years old, when his times began separating sharply from his age group. At 16, when he skated his first 34-second 500m and won his first US national title, he began measuring himself against the top end of the sport rather than his own generation.

Around that time he spent a season working closely with Shani Davis, the back-to-back Olympic 1000m champion and last true crossover American star of the long track, whose influence extended beyond mechanics. Davis was relentlessly realistic: nothing was ever a 10 out of 10. Maybe a six or a seven. The idea stuck – a way of measuring performance that left room for constant refinement rather than satisfaction. You can hear it in the way Stolz talks even now. Good. Never perfect.

The results followed quickly. Olympic debut at 17 in Beijing. World all-round champion at 20 – the youngest since Heiden. Seven world titles before 21.

But what separates Stolz from most elite skaters is not just how fast he became. It is how early he began treating speed as something to be engineered rather than chased.

Long track appeals to him because, in his mind, it is honest. You train. You get stronger. You skate your time. No one can knock you out through chaos or contact. Outcomes are decided long before the starting gun.

That mindset extends to equipment. Frustrated by manufacturing inconsistencies, Stolz once spent six hours at a blade factory checking 77 pairs of blades by hand, hunting for minute differences in bend and tilt that could produce what he calls “free speed”.

Each stride becomes data, each corner a physics problem. Even in training, he prefers leading his own laps rather than drafting teammates, wanting the effort – and the isolation – to mirror race conditions.

Over the past two seasons, the results have bordered on surreal. World Cup win streaks stacking into the twenties. Races won not through dramatic surges but through steady, clinical dismantling. He is, by any measure, the sport’s next supernova – except he does not burn. He hums.

Perfection, even quiet perfection, does not arrive without friction. The past year tested Stolz in ways no stopwatch could measure – crashes, illness, training interruptions.

Speed skating has fewer variables than most outdoor sports, but not none. Ice temperature. Thickness. Surface softness. All of it matters. Stolz talks about “fast ice” like a technician: colder, harder surfaces keep you riding higher; softer ice makes you sink and lose glide.

Milan’s track – built as a temporary Olympic venue after plans for an outdoor rink in Piné were rejected – adds a layer of unpredictability early in a Games, before crews get it exactly where they want it. Stolz does not obsess over those uncertainties. He catalogues them.

The same is true of fame. Commercials, media attention, a growing portfolio endorsements – none of it, he says, changes race results. Once the gun fires, there is only execution. Which is why, when asked to name his biggest Olympic rival, he often lands on the same answer.

Himself.

* * *

In Milan, the Olympic village and media zones grow louder by the day. Broadcast trucks hum. National team staff move in tight logistical loops. The first long-track sessions are close enough now that time feels compressed.

Stolz says he is enjoying it more this time than in Beijing four years ago. He is older. More certain of where he fits in the sport and where the sport fits in him. He tries, deliberately, to make the Olympics feel like just another World Cup, using routine as control.

Asked how ready he feels, he gives the same answer he has given all week.

Ninety-five percent. Good. Not perfect.

At the Olympics, the last 5% is where history lives. The margins that made Stolz dominant for the past three winters will be the same ones that decide everything here. One imperfect corner. One blade edge a fraction too shallow. One moment where noise leaks in.

On Wednesday at dusk in Milan’s western suburbs, he will step on to Olympic ice again, into noise he cannot fully control, into races measured in hundredths and careers measured in outcomes.

The 1000m has belonged to the Netherlands for three straight Olympics. But even the Dutch star Kjeld Nuis – unbeaten across his Olympic career – conceded Tuesday the landscape had changed. “Of course, if you compete you can win, but it wouldn’t make any sense if I were to say that now,” he said. “For me a podium spot is the best I can get.”

If everything works – if the calibration holds, if the edges are clean, if the silence inside stays louder than the noise outside – Stolz may leave these Games standing in the same historical space Heiden carved out nearly half a century ago.

If not, he will do what he always does. Adjust. Measure. Refine.

Either way, he will line up, settle into the start and wait for the gun. Ninety-five percent ready. The rest will be decided at full speed.

“I try not to think about all the things people will say. I just focus on how I’m feeling and what I think is possible,” Stolz said. “Many things are possible, but I have to actually do it.”