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Ocala’s Olympians have golden chances in Beijing
The
cala Olympians
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Three native Ocalans are medal favorites at the 2022 Beijing Olympics in speed skating. The notion that a trio of Floridians rising to the top of winter sports is fascinating the world … and fortunate for the U.S. Olympic Team. The Ocala Olympians — Brittany Bowe, Erin Jackson and Joey Mantia — all have roots in inline skating and all have been to the Olympics before. Now, with the world watching, they will try to win on the biggest of sport’s stages.
BY BRAD ROGERS
Brittany Bowe on top and in search of gold
Being the center of attention in the sports arena is nothing new for Brittany Bowe. At the age of two she performed dribbling exhibitions during halftime of high school games coached by her father, Mike. Later, she was an All-Star pitcher on a boys Little League baseball team. She was pretty good at soccer, too, earning a spot on a statewide traveling team … for boys.
When Bowe started high school, she had to give up soccer to play basketball because the seasons overlapped. She ended up being a three-time Marion County girls high school basketball player of the year and earning a scholarship to Florida Atlantic University.
In between baseball and soccer and basketball, Bowe was racking up victories on the national and global stages as a competitive inline skater, under the watchful eye of Ocala skating coach Renee Hildebrand. She started inline skating at age 8 and would go on to win a national championship at age 10 and 32 world championship medals between 2002 and 2008.
So, when Bowe finished college at FAU in 2010, she initially planned to go to Europe to play basketball – the sport she describes as her “first love” – with the hope of making it
to the WNBA. Then Bowe had “kind of a change of heart.” She saw her former inline competitors moving from wheels to blades to the Olympics and decided if they could do it, so could she.
She moved to Salt Lake City to learn how to skate on ice. After only a year, she was invited to train with the national team. A year after that she was turning heads in the sport. In 2013, she arrived, breaking the world record in the 1000 meters. That would be a precursor to her first Olympic team spot at the 2014 Sochi Games.
The Sochi Games, however, were a disappointment. Bowe competed in the 500m, 1000m and 1500m and did not finish anywhere near the medals. But the next two years were fruitful, with Bowe setting world records in the 1000 and the 1500 and setting herself up for a return to the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.
Then came the greatest challenge of Bowe’s life. During a practice in 2016, Bowe collided with a teammate, causing her to sustain a concussion. It was so severe that it kept Bowe off the ice the entire 2016-17 season. She suffered crippling pain, anxiety and panic attacks. She could not skate… at all. Through intense rehab and support from her mother, Debbie, and sister, Brooke, Bowe healed and returned to the ice and earned a spot on the 2018 Olympic team. There, she earned a bronze in the team pursuit and finished fourth in the 1000, her specialty.
Now it’s on to the Beijing Olympics.
Of course, Bowe already has brought global attention to both her skills, U.S. speed skating and, yes, Ocala, before the Games even started. After fellow Ocalan Erin Jackson slipped in her 500m trial and missed making the team, despite being No. 1 in the world in that event, Bowe, who won the trials, relinquished her spot to Jackson. The magnanimous gesture was rewarded when Bowe was given a spot in the Olympic 500m event because other nations did not use all their slots in the event. Nonetheless, the Olympian act by Bowe brought glowing attention to her and her hometown.
Now 33 and at the twilight of her skating career and America’s most accomplished active speed skater, Bowe knows this is likely her last Olympics and she’s got one goal – winning Olympic gold.
“Gold. It’s my ultimate goal,” she told olympics.com. “Anything less than gold is going to feel like mission not accomplished.”
The world record holder in the 1000 and a former record holder in the 1500, Bowe is considered a medal favorite in those events. It will be her third Olympics and once again she’ll be the center of attention in the sports arena. It’s familiar territory.
For Erin Jackson, a gift of a second chance
Erin Jackson is an overachiever. No matter what she has pursued in life, she has time and again risen to the top. Whether it was competitive inline skating or roller derby or school, Jackson has inevitably emerged as a winner.
Then came the U.S. Olympic Trials last month in Milwaukee. Jackson entered the trials as the world No.1 in 500 meters and the gold medal favorite. But she slipped during her time trial, causing her to finish third and miss a spot on the team going to the Beijing Games. It was a heartbreaking end to a re-
markable year in which Jackson had won four of the eight World Cup 500m races.
Of course, as has been splashed across news sites and even the cover of Sports Illustrated since then, Jackson’s fate took an unbelievable turn when fellow Ocalan Brittany Bowe – who had won the 500m time trial but who also made the team in the 1000m and 1500m events, her two specialties – gave her spot in the 500m to Jackson. It was an act of tremendous generosity, a bona fide Olympic moment that captured the world’s attention. Jackson now enters the Games the gold medal favorite.
“She has earned the spot; she deserves it,” said Bowe, who is ranked No. 1 in the world in the 1000m. “… Erin has a chance to bring home a medal, hopefully a gold medal, and it’s my honor to give her that opportunity.”
Like her fellow Ocala Olympic speed skaters Bowe and Joey Mantia, Jackson got her start in skating here as an inline skater under the tutelage of legendary skating coach Renee Hildebrand. The Forest High graduate began inline skating in 2002, at age 8. Over the next decade Jackson would become one of the world’s most successful inline skaters – she’s a 12-time Inline World Championship medalist and 47-time Inline National Champion.
In 2012, she took up professional roller derby and went on to become a three-time United States Olympic Committee Female Athlete of the Year for Roller Sports (2012, 2013 and 2015.)
All the while, Jackson was watching the success of Bowe and Mantia, along with other inline skaters she grew up competing against, on the ice.
“Seeing their success growing up and how they were able to transfer over to the ice, and then seeing them make it to the Olympics, was something I always wanted to do as well,” Jackson said in a 2021 interview with Forbes.
At age 25, she decided to move to Salt Lake City, Utah, where the Olympic speed skating team trains. The 2018 Olympics were just months away.
But let’s not forget, Jackson is an overachiever.
After just four months of training on the ice, Jackson improbably made the 2018 team that would go to the PyeongChang Games in South Korea in the 500m – an achievement Jackson herself called “a shock” and one that made her the first black woman to compete on the U.S. long track speed skating team.
Despite her outsized success on both inline skates and ice skates, there is much more to Jackson than athletics. A graduate of Forest’s EMIT program (Engineering and Manufacturing institute of Technology), she went on to graduate in 2015 cum laude from the University of Florida with a degree in materials science and engineering. While in Salt Lake City, she has also earned an associate’s degree in computer science and is starting on an associate degree in exercise science and kinesiology. She once told an interviewer, “I should put down ‘school’ as one of my hobbies.”
But the books will have to wait. This week, Erin Jackson will be at the Olympics, with a friend’s golden gift of a shot at winning a gold medal.
Joey Mantia hoping third time is an Olympic charm
Joey Mantia has some unfinished business.
Mantia, who will turn 36 on Feb. 7 during the Beijing Olympic Games, has won medals and titles around the world in both his first sport, inline skating, and his current sport, speed skating on ice.
As an inline phenom Mantia compiled perhaps the most impressive resume of inline skaters in history: 28 World Championship titles, three Pan American Games titles, 15 World Cup gold medals, 12 Junior World titles and more than 90 national championships. At 17, his last year as a Junior inline skater, he nearly swept the World Championships, winning gold in 10 of the 12 races and winning silver in the other two.
As the leader of the current U.S. Olympic speed skating team, he is ranked No. 1 in the world in the 1500 meters, holds the world record in the mass start and just recently set the record as the oldest man to ever win a World Cup speed skating event.
In addition to the 1500m, Mantia will compete in the 1000m, the mass start and team pursuit at the Beijing Olympics. He competed in those events at the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the 2018 PyeongChang Games, but came home empty handed both times. At the 2018 Olympics, he improved markedly over his 2014 performance, finishing in the top 10 in each event, but still no medals.
Now, with age 36 upon him, Mantia knows he is running out of time. He wants and needs to win now.
“I’m living and dying by a gold medal,” the Vanguard graduate told Fox Sports last month.
“I’m done with the whole thing of giving the politically correct answer to take the pressure away from myself. It’s not about saying how I want to enjoy the process and we’ll see what happens anymore. … I’ve lived the journey. It’s not about the journey now. It’s about the destination.”
Mantia got his start in skating like his fellow Ocalans on the U.S. Olympic team, Brittany Bowe and Erin Jackson – inline skating under Ocala coach Renee Hildebrand. He had tried gymnastics, baseball and even karate, but they didn’t work out. Looking for something to do that was in the air conditioning and out of the Florida heat, Mantia took up roller skating. He caught Hildebrand’s eye, and in his first season of inline competition he was Junior National Champion.
After his wildly successful inline career, Mantia decided in 2010 to pursue speed skating on ice and headed west, eventually being invited in 2012 to train with the U.S. Olympic team in Salt Lake City, Utah. A year later he won his first gold medal at a World Cup event in Berlin. Of his first experience on ice skates, Mantia once told an interviewer it was ugly. “Think Bambi on ice, except with bigger thighs.”
Speaking of thighs, Mantia is known in the speed skating world for his brutal workouts. “Every day is leg day” is his motto, and his tree-trunk thighs are proof of its intensity and effectiveness. He also is an entrepreneur, owning an events production company and the Coffee Lab, a coffee shop at the University of Utah.
In his free time, Mantia likes to ride, both his bicycle and his motorcycle. He is also very active on social media, and his skating instructional videos are followed globally.
Oh, he also plays the piano – and he’s self-taught.
Mantia goes to Beijing as a world record holder and three-time world champion in the mass start and No. 1 in the world in the 1500m. He is considered a medal contender in the 1000m and team pursuit as well. The last individual speed skating medal won by the U.S. was in 2010, a silver by Shani Davis in Mantia’s best race, the 1500m. Mantia’s hope now is that his journey to this point will deliver him to the destination he so desperately wants – a place on the Olympic medal podium.
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