The upset of the Olympics has gone down.
Hold the phone, just a little, on Jordan Stolz.
And say hello to Ning Zhongyan.
The speedskater from China set a new Olympic record in the 1,500-m competition on Wednesday, crossing the finish in 1 min., 41.98 sec. at the Milan Speed Skating Oval. American Jordan Stolz, 21, already a double Olympic champion at these Games and the overwhelming favorite to win this distance, had his shot to best Zhongyan in the final pairing. He’d already set two Olympic records here in Milan. What’s one more?
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Skating alongside the reigning 1,500-m world champion, Norway’s Peder Kongshaug—Stolz was recovering from pneumonia at that 2025 race and still finished second—Stolz was 0.37 sec. behind at 300 m. We’d seen Stolz fall behind the pace at the start of the 1,000-m race too, which he won on Feb. 11. “He wins on the speed and on the kick,” Joey Cheek, the 500-m Olympic champion in 2006, told TIME before the race. “No one has the speed and the kick. He’s so physically strong, he can absorb so much workload. These are just a set of traits that don’t exist in a single person.”
Read More: Jordan Stolz, Double Olympic Champion at 21, Could Already Be the Speedskating GOAT
So no cause for major concern. But at 700 m, with two laps to go, Stolz lost even more time. He was now nearly a full second behind Zhongyan. With one lap to go, Stolz bled more time: he was now 1.35 sec. off the pace. Stolz is the best finisher in his sport. But this gap was just too wide. He now was sitting fourth. Off the podium.
Which seemed impossible. Stolz put on his burners in the last lap and crossed the line with a medal: a silver, never anything to sniff at. He finished .77 sec. behind Zhongyan. As Zhongyan raised his arms and took his victory lap holding the Chinese flag, Stolz bowed his head. He was exhausted, using all his kick to salvage a medal. Zhongyan shed joyous tears.
“When Jordan was skating in the last pair, I still did not think the gold was mine,” said Zhongyan after his win. “He has been in incredible form all season. Even after he crossed the line, I was still not completely sure. It was only when the result was confirmed that it started to sink in. It is an amazing feeling.”
No doubt, Stolz’s silver stalls his storyline’s momentum. As with a Summer Olympics counterpart—says, Michael Phelps—Stolz’s quest for perfection, stretched across multiple races at the Games, was catnip for NBC, and even casual fans of a niche sport like speedskating. Will he or won’t he become just the second male speedskater in history to win four golds at an Olympics, with American Eric Heiden, who won five in 1980, being the only other? (Heiden has been on hand in Milan, cheering on his fellow Wisconsinite.)
Read More: U.S. Speedskater Jordan Stolz Sets a New Olympic Record in His First Milano Cortina Race
Cheek thought that more than the 500 m, or the 1,000 m, Stolz was a safe bet in the 1,500 m. He is a two-time world champion and the reigning back-to-back World Cup champion in the distance. Going into the Games, he had won eight of nine 1,500-m World Cup races, battling that case of pneumonia in his only loss.
“I think he’s going to do it,” Cheek, an NBC speedskating commentator, told TIME a few hours before Thursday’s race. “I think it would take a meteor strike for him not to.”
That meteor, it turns out, was Zhongyan, one of China’s opening-ceremonies flag bearers at these Olympics. Zhongyan, 26, won his third medal of the Games, as he finished third in the 1000-m competition and the team pursuit. Zhongyan had also won the 2024 1000-m sprint world title, becoming the first male Chinese speedskater to ever do so. He’s not some unknown. But smashing the Olympic record, and besting Stolz, counts as a stunner.
Stolz is not done. With a win in Saturday’s mass start, in which 24 athletes skate 16 laps to decide the winner, Stolz would be the first male speedskater to win three golds at a single Olympics since Johann Olav Koss of Norway did it at his home Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. Zhongyan, however, is set to join Stolz on the starting line.
Look out for the meteor.
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