stand atop the podium—and earned medals two more
times. She’s now the U.S.’s best medal hope in the sport.
Jackson almost missed Beijing, when a slip in the
500 meters at Olympic trials in early January left her
just outside the qualifying slots. But Brittany Bowe, one
of Jackson’s closest friends and a medal contender in the
1,000-meter and 1,500-meter events, gave up her spot in
the 500. “In my heart there was never a question that I
would do whatever it took, if it came down to me, to get
Erin to skate the Olympics,” Bowe said. “No one is more
deserving than her.”
Jackson’s first memories are of her-
self as a toddler, tooling around in
little plastic roller skates. Growing
up in Ocala, Fla., she quickly became
a “rink rat,” she says, “someone who
goes to the open sessions, just hanging
out with their friends, skating around
to the music.” At 8, she tried artistic
skating—basically figure skating on
wheels—until her coaches began com-
plaining that she was going too fast. So,
she switched to inline speedskating and
started racking up national titles while
also competing in roller derby. But an
inconvenient truth nagged at her: Inline
skating is not an Olympic sport.
So during a trip to the Netherlands
in 2016, Jackson stepped hesitantly
onto an ice rink, like fellow Ocalans
and inliners turned Olympians Bowe
and Joey Mantia before her. It was her
first time on ice, and she did not like it.
The motion wasn’t as close to inline as
she had expected: Ice skaters generate
power from their hips rather than their
legs. And the surface itself posed a real
challenge. She could not get on and off
it without help, or even stop reliably.
It was also cold. So Jackson returned
to Florida and the temperate comforts
of inline skating.
But Jackson’s inline skating had
success caught the attention of the
International Skating Union’s tran-
sition program, designed to identify
athletes who might be good candi-
dates for speedskating. She gave the
ice another try a few months later in
Salt Lake City, then quit again. Then,
when the dreams of Olympic gold
became unignorable, she returned for
good in September 2017.“There was never one of these things where she was
already at the top in another sport and she was letting
ego get in the way,” says her coach, Ryan Shimabukuro.
“She said, I’m willing to start over again from square one.”
In January 2018, Shimabukuro scheduled Jackson to
compete at Olympic trials, in Milwaukee, just to get her
some reps against strong competition in anticipation of
a serious effort in ’22. “I didn’t even tell my dad and my
family that I was going to the Olympic trials, because to
me, it wasn’t the Olympic trials,” she says. “I was going toHERE TO STAY
Though she didn’t start on ice skates until age 24, Jackson is
determined to build an Olympic legacy on speedskating blades.KO
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BEIJING WINTER OLYMPICS