#strongertogether Ocala roller rinks to global ice: How Team USA’s speed skating trio grew from inline roots to Olympian heights
In an apt illustration of what it means to be #StrongerTogether, read all about how the top-ranked trio of USA speed skaters (Brittany Bowe, Joey Mantia and Erin Jackson) joined forces at an early age with a local roller skating coach in out-of-the-way Ocala, Florida -- and eventually reached the cusp of Olympic glory.
A minor mystery unfolds upon first glance at the Team USA speed skating roster for the Beijing Olympic Winter Games.
Not only are there three skaters from the balmy state of Florida – each a firm golden hopeful – but they all hail from the small city of Ocala, tucked away between Orlando and Jacksonville, where the only place you're likely to find ice is in the drinks.
“I guess there’s just something in the water down there,” seven-time speed skating world champion Brittany Bowe, still “a Florida Girl” at heart despite swapping the Sunshine State for the mountain-ringed chill of Salt Lake City, told Olympics.com.
Bowe, the 33-year-old seven-time world champion and world record holder in the 1000m, is heading for her third Games. So is Joey Mantia, 35, where he'll be in with a shout of winning his first medal in his favoured 1500m. Erin Jackson, 29, USA's record holder in the women's 500m, is also a contender for Olympic gold in Beijing (her second trip to the Games).
A keen coach and roller rinks: Ocala's secret weapons
How does this small city in the United States’ extreme south, with a sub-tropical climate, produce three of the world's fastest racers in their respective distances? It’s a city, mind you, with no ice rink.
The answer, no matter what angle you come at it from, begins with Renee Hildebrand.
“My mom just ran into this woman at a diner in town [Ocala] and it turned out she was a world-renowned inline speed skating coach,” said Erin Jackson, a self proclaimed former “rink rat” who, as a kid, loved to hang out at Ocala’s two roller rinks, about the moment a well-disguised path to the Olympic Games opened up before her.
“My mom was like ‘oh I have this daughter who loves to skate’ and she told her to bring me over to the rink for practise and it went from there,” added Jackson, who went on to become a 47-times inline national champion and a Pan-Am Games silver-medallist.
That woman was Hildebrand, one of the world's top coaches in the sport of inline speed skating. With a keen eye for velocity and potential, physical form and possibilities, she always kept one eye on the rinks in Ocala in the early 1990s. And she helped turn all three of the Beijing-bound Ocala natives – Mantia, Bowe and Jackson – into champions in the niche sport of inline speed skating.
“I was at a birthday party at the local roller rink, and she just saw me, you know, skating around,” added Bowe, the world's fastest woman over 1000m, about her first meeting with Hildebrand who she calls “the best inline skating coach” in the world. “She invited me to a practice and that’s where it all started.”
Hildebrand, a Florida native and a physical therapist by trade, speaks fast and, as she does, her passion for the sport of inline racing comes tumbling out of her.
She remembers something special about first seeing eight-year-old Bowe on her plastic skates. “They had little one-lap races and I remember she took off the line like a rocket,” said Hildebrand, the former Dutch and Belgian national inline speed skating team coach who “grew up in a roller rink” and played the novelty sport of roller derby in its heyday on quad-skates (four-wheels on each skate).
“She couldn’t cross corners or anything, but she had such intensity and drive,” Hildebrand added of the raw talent she saw in Bowe.
Mantia’s gymnastic start
Mantia, the third member of the Ocala trio heading to Beijing as a medal favourite in the 1500m, was spotted in a gymnasium.
“He was on a gymnastics team with my daughter and I liked what I saw watching him work out with the coach,” said Hildebrand of her first time seeing the eventual two-time Olympian, Mantia, who recently became the oldest man to win a 1500m World Cup race.
“I didn’t say anything then, but the next week I saw him in the roller rink and I said ‘oh yeah, that’s that little guy who was climbing up that rope’ and I already knew how strong he was,” she said.
But all of that was just potential. Hildebrand spotted kids with potential almost every day. What came after, and the most important element, was the work. And Hildebrand was no cheerleader. She was tough and a coach who expected much of her young inliners.
“I don’t know when I first thought I could go to the Olympics,” Mantia admitted. “It was my coach [Hildebrand] who was telling me I could do it long before I ever thought so.”
“She was very intense. She wanted to win,” said Bowe, a top collegiate basketball player before becoming a world champion speed skater. “She pulled the best out of us and expected nothing but the best – one of our slogans even from when we were little was ‘practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practise makes perfect.'”
“I am forever grateful for her,” added Bowe of her first coach who even took her to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City when she was 13 years old to see fellow Floridian and one-time inline champion Jennifer Rodriguez and U.S. hero Apolo Ohno win his 1500m gold. “She instilled those expectations in me at such a young age.”
“When you find one, it’s rare – it’s kind of like a jewel,” said Hildebrand who coaxed and drove all three of Ocala's Beijing-bound skaters to the top of inline speed skating before they switched over to ice. “You really want to protect them and grow them up in the sport.”
Goodbye wheels; hello ice
Hildebrand can only take her inliners so far. Despite the bumper sticker she's had since 1980 that says, Roller Skating, Next Stop: The Olympics,' speed skating on ice remains the only Olympic outlet for the most talented – and driven – inline racers. At some stage, if her skaters have Olympic ambitions, they have to make the switch to ice on their own.
It’s never easy. “I never felt so intimidated in my life,” said Bowe about her first time on ice. “It was a scary moment for me.”
It’s not easy for Hildebrand either, who’s never in her life speed-skated on ice. She has to say goodbye and hope she’s fully prepared her speedsters, hand-picked from in and around unlikely Ocala, for a future where the possibility of massive glory and crushing defeat lurks around ever corner.
It's bittersweet for the coach.
“I stay close with them because they’re all like family – and we’ve had a relationship for so long and they’ve just become wonderful humans,” said Hildebrand, evidence of the often-time hidden winds that can guide athletes to their Olympian heights. “But as far as the Olympics, I’ll just be a spectator.”
