Three months after a bike crash, Jordan Stolz appears to be in good health and strong form.
Stolz was riding his bike June 2, doing sprints and traveling about 40 mph, when he hit a bump on a country road and the chain on his Trek bike unraveled. The dismantling happened just as Stolz was pushing down, all of his weight on one pedal, so he lost control of the bike, went over the handlebars and crashed into the ditch of a side road near his house in Kewaskum.
The Olympic speedskater could see right away that his right leg was cut.
On the roadside, he pried his phone from his shredded bike jersey – his bike helmet was also cracked in two – and called his sister for help. When his father arrived, he wrapped a shirt around the leg and raced Stolz to a hospital.
“I was just hoping nothing was broken, I was hoping the X-rays would be fine,” Stolz said. “Because it was hurting pretty bad.”
Legs are everything, obviously, to speedskaters – but the area of the leg in particular that was injured is especially sensitive. It bears all of the weight. If the front shin is damaged, he can’t “sit” properly in a speedskate position and the mechanics can be thrown off with how his leg and his foot work together while skating.
It was worrisome that Stolz could see the white of his shin bone from the cut. He could see his tendons moving as well.
He had to endure a three-hour wait before the emergency room staff could get to him and sew him up with 16 stitches.
Even now, months later at the Pettit National Ice Center for practice Sept. 10, when Stolz recalls the ER visit, he’s not sure if the patch-up job at the hospital was the greatest, either.
And yet he is thankful.
“I’m sure it could have been way worse,” Stolz said. “I could have been broken – all over. It was just this; I was lucky. It healed up fairly well.”
He took just one week off and took a course of amoxicillin to fight any infection. And that was it.
The mark, deep red on his leg, resembles a lightning bolt.
“Now he’s got a Harry Potter scar,” his coach, Bob Corby, said.
It’s kind of funny because when Stolz was a kid, someone called him “Flash Jordan” (a play on words from the 1980 movie, Flash Gordon).
Stolz said he’s OK now; in fact, he believes he is as strong as he’s ever been. And that’s a testament to him and his work ethic, along with the training guidance of Corby.
Stolz’s mentality and mental toughness always has been elite. While he’s just 21 years old, he seems to be unfazed by adversity, whether it’s the pressure of being the favorite for the upcoming Olympics, or dealing with setbacks of any kind. It is almost impossible to knock him off focus.
Asked if he was on crutches for a bit, he gave a serious side eye. “Crutches …” he said, with a laugh. “It wasn’t broken.”
Stolz, an avid cyclist who uses road riding for offseason training, was right back in the saddle in mid-June, with his shin taped up. He could still feel pain and discomfort.
Even five weeks later, his wound looked open, gnarly and somewhat raw. The healing process probably was closer to two months.
“It was pretty long, yeah,” Stolz said. “They were talking about something like having me seeing a specialist, but I didn’t feel like doing that.”
And the idea of taking time off was absurd to him.
“Well, I can’t just take a month off,” he said. “Then I would just lose too much.”
2025 has been a year of adversity for Jordan Stolz
Stolz had a meteoric rise in the speedskating world both before and after he made his debut at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Winning World Cup events, claiming the top spot in the standings and seizing overall championships − including the 2024 World Allround − he was almost making it look easy.
Then in 2025, he faced adversity.
He fell in a warm-up before a World Cup event in Calgary in January, and then got sick with a stomach issue, but still managed to win gold medals.
The next weekend in Milwaukee, Stolz took three gold medals and a rare silver in his fourth race in the ISU World Cup. The day after racing concluded, he had strep throat and pneumonia.
“I thought it was just a little cold but it kept getting worse,” Stolz said.
He didn’t skate for two weeks and the antibiotic medicine he needed to help recover wreaked havoc on his digestive system. That made getting the essential fuel intake challenging.
“That just ruined me, and the antibiotics made it worse,” Stolz said. “It just kills your gut.”
Subsequently, his greatest challenger, Jenning De Boo, took gold in a 500-meter World Cup event. But Stolz returned to racing, and easily took the overall standings champion for the World Cup season. At one point, he had an ISU World Cup gold-medal streak of 18; that number jumped to 22 if another race weekend in the season is included.
And then, in March, Stolz was not 100% well and could not defend his World Championship, where he was the two-time champion in 2023 and 2024 in the 500-, 1,000- and 1,500-meter races.
Yet he still medaled in all three World Championship events, despite the setbacks, remaining a contender as the top favorite for the Olympics in 2026.
Now, with the summer break over and the ice back on the track at the Pettit National Ice Center for the fall season, Stolz is back to work as usual. He said his leg feels strong and there are no issues. And his focus is back to the season ahead.
“Yeah I guess you could say it was motivating, if you want to write that,” Stolz said of the setbacks of 2025. “I would kind of keep that on my mind throughout the summer.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Lori Nickel: Olympic speedskater Jordan Stolz is back on the ice after a serious bike crash in June
Reporting by Lori Nickel, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
