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player ready...For all but two weeks of the last two seasons, Brittany Bowe has been a consistent medalist on the world speedskating circuit.
The performance gap came at the 2014 Winter Olympics, the worst time possible for a U.S. athlete in a sport her country notices for only those two weeks every four years.
It cost a chance at any sponsorship money, left her with half the official funding of a year ago and made her rely on parental funding for auto and health insurance.
That Bowe recently had the best individual podium performance in history by a U.S. skater at one edition of the World Single Distance Championships, with two gold medals and one silver in her three events, only makes what happened in Sochi, Russia, last year more irritating and confounding.
“I definitely still have a sour taste about it,” she said.
Bowe was talking via Skype last week while sitting in a stairwell at an Inzell, Germany, inn, where some members of the U.S. team were training between the single distance championships in the Netherlands and the World Sprint Championships Saturday and Sunday in Kazakhstan. The stairwell was the best place to grab the Wi-Fi signal from the inn’s closed restaurant.
She and the U.S. long-track team had arrived in Russia a year ago with strong medal hopes based on their results on last year’s World Cup circuit. They went 0-for-Sochi, the first time since 1984 U.S. speedskaters had failed to win an Olympic medal.
Bowe, 26, had been on the podium six times in her eight World Cup races at 1,000 and 1,500 meters leading to the Olympics, setting a world record in the 1,000.
In Sochi, she finished 13th in the 500, eighth in the 1,000 and 14th in the 1,500.
In the Netherlands almost exactly a year later, she won the 1,000 with the fastest time ever at a non-altitude assisted rink, won the 1,500 and finished second to U.S. teammate and 2014 Olympian Heather Richardson in the 500. Richardson took second in the 1,000 and third in the 1,500.
So what happened at the Olympics?
“I wish I had a clear-cut answer,” Bowe said. “There was the skin suit hoopla. The talk that having an outdoor pre-Olympic training camp for 10 days (at altitude in Italy) wasn’t ideal for somebody who never had skated outdoors.
“A lot of factors could or could not have played a part. Will we ever know? I don’t think so.”
The skin suit hoopla became an all-consuming issue for the U.S. team in Sochi, where the skaters first competed in the new Under Armour skin suits designed for the Olympics. When one subpar result followed another, the suits were altered, and then some skaters simply went back to the Under Armour suits they had worn earlier in the season.
“I was told the (Olympic) skin suit was the fastest ever made,” Bowe said. “I believed it, as did the rest of the team. Then there were all these changes, and it 100 percent starts playing mind games. I think I’m a mentally tough person, but you can only take so much beating.
“At the end of the day, I didn’t perform. Whether that was in or out of my control does eat me up inside.”
When the season ended a month later, after Bowe had won two more World Cup medals, she went to her family’s home in Ocala, Fla., to decompress and try to make some sense of five months with the highest highs and lowest lows.
When she returned to training in Salt Lake City, it was with a new coaching staff, as the Sochi debacle led U.S. Speedskating to clean house. Richardson chose to join a Dutch club team and train there — her fiance is Dutch Olympic champion Jorrit Bergsma — but Bowe said she turned down a similar option because she was not ready to give up her life in Utah.
There also had been a feeling the Utah-based skaters, training at 4,000 feet, developed technical habits best suited to speeds they never would attain at sea-level rinks like Sochi. Yet the world single distance meet was at sea level, and Bowe has won eight medals this season in four World Cup meets at rinks no more than 400 feet above sea level.
This is just Bowe’s fifth season on ice after a successful career as an in-liner and as a point guard at Florida Atlantic. It isn’t easy financially, especially since much of her funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee is results-based, and the Sochi shutout meant a big hit to the top U.S. skaters.
“I’m able to make ends meet with prize money and my mom’s help,” she said.
Bowe has won some $17,000 so far this season, with $9,000 from the single distance championships. She could wind up with about $30,000.
It is just important, as Bowe looks toward the skating at sea level at the 2018 Pyeongchang, South Korea Winter Games, that she has won back her confidence — as well as a first career world title, all in a new Under Armour suit.
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Once again, she is comfortable in her own skin.
Twitter @olyphil