American Jordan Stolz won his first four races of the speed skating World Cup season, including shattering two track records, in Nagano, Japan.
Stolz, a 20-year-old coming off a historic 2023-24 season, won the 500m and then the 1500m in a two-hour span Friday at the M-Wave, the 1998 Olympic arena. He broke the 1500m track record by 1.07 seconds, clocking 1:43.65.
Then on Saturday, Stolz took the 1000m in 1:07.18, nine hundredths shy of the fastest time at or around sea level in history. He broke the Nagano track record by 1.15 seconds and won by 1.11, greater than the margin separating second place from 10th place.
On Sunday, he won another 500m, missing the track record by one hundredth of a second. Stolz has won 12 consecutive World Cup races among the 500m, 1000m and 1500m dating to last season.
“That man is unbeatable right now. At least not by me,” two-time Olympic 1500m champion Kjeld Nuis, who was fourth in Friday’s 1500m, said, according to a translation from Dutch. “The way he accelerated: phenomenal.”
The World Cup season continues next week — live on Peacock — at the 2022 Olympic oval in Beijing.
In March 2023, Stolz became the youngest skater to win a world title in a single distance and the first man to win three individual golds at a single world championships with his sweep of the 500m, 1000m and 1500m.
Last winter, he repeated the triple at worlds, then went on to become the youngest man to win the world allround title since fellow Wisconsinite Eric Heiden in 1978. He also broke the 1000m world record.
This winter, Stolz has new targets: World Cup season titles. Those prizes go to the skaters who accumulate the most points per distance over the six-stop World Cup series that runs to March.
Stolz has never won a World Cup season title at any distance, due in part to the fact that he has never raced every World Cup in a season. Stolz does plan to race every World Cup this season, including a home stop in Milwaukee at the end of January.
Stolz also believes he could challenge the 500m world record this season. Last season, he skated 33.69 in Calgary, which was eight hundredths off Russian Pavel Kulizhnikov’s world record from 2019.
The ovals in Salt Lake City and Calgary are the fastest in the world due to their altitude. Salt Lake City, where most world records are set, does not have a World Cup stop this winter, but Calgary does from Jan. 24-26.
In offseason and preseason training, Stolz focused more on his primary events — 500m, 1000m and 1500m, the three shortest races — than the previous year, when he put in additional endurance work. He had to skate a 5000m and 10,000 at allround worlds last March, but there are no allround worlds this season.
