Long-shot Jackson powers her way to Pyeongchang
Erin Jackson wasn’t just a long shot to make the U.S. Olympic long-track speedskating team earlier this month. She was a no shot. Vegas would have given the Minnesota Vikings better odds to win their NFC divisional playoff game on a last-gasp fling and a prayer.
An accomplished inline skater but a novice on clap skates, Jackson of Ocala, Fla., was out of her element when she stepped on ice for the first time in February.
“I was pretty scared of crashing,” she said. “It was totally foreign. It’s a completely different feeling from being on inlines, and it was just kind of hard for me to wrap my head around that because I’ve been skating my whole life.”
Two weeks before the trials at Pettit National Ice Center, she’d never broken 40 seconds over 500 meters. She wasn’t s-l-o-w, but she wasn’t Bonnie Blair, either. And technically speaking, she was a mess. She skated with her hips too high and flailed her arms in the corners, holding on for dear life.
But she had one thing in her favor: Her legs were bands of steel, imbued with strength from years of inline racing. The force with which she pushed her blades down into the ice made veteran observers sit up and take notice.
“You can almost smell the power coming out,” said Guy Thibault, U.S. Speedskating’s high-performance director.
Still, when asked how remote she thought her chances were of making the long-track team on a 1 to 10 scale (with a 10 being the worst), Jackson said, “Probably 12.”
Then she went out and shocked everyone, including herself.
In the first of two 500-meter races, she was timed in a personal-best 39.22 seconds. In the second race, an hour later, she went 39.04. She earned the third of three spots on the U.S. team for the Pyeongchang Games, behind Olympic veterans Brittany Bowe and Heather Bergsma.
It was by far the biggest surprise of the trials.
The next day, Jackson’s head was still spinning. There was paperwork to fill out. There were 2,000 notifications on her Facebook account. There was an itinerary she didn’t expect, a training camp in Milwaukee, travel plans to
South Korea.
“It’s just been crazy,” she said. “I’m still kind of processing it. To be ready for something like this, you have to have sort of an idea that it could happen, right? I didn’t have much of an idea, so it’s just kind of thrown on me.”
There is little chance she will win a medal in Pyeongchang. The fastest women in the world are three seconds faster than Jackson.
But her rapid improvement bodes well for the future.
“She cut two seconds in, like, a month,” Thibault said. “I mean, I really doubt she’s going to be top 10 (in Korea), but I think she’s going to skate 37s a year from now. Thirty-seven is usually top 10. And I think she’s probably going to skate 36 within two years, so you’re talking podium.
“She’s going to be a big deal.” She already is. Jackson, 25, is a University of Florida graduate, with a degree in materials engineering. She has done research in dental materials and ultimately wants to pursue a career in the bio-med field.
She’s also the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic longtrack team. Maame Biney, who was born in Ghana, made the U.S. short-track team.
“I guess I’ve only been a role model in that sense for a couple days now, so I haven’t put too much thought into it yet,” Jackson said. “But I did realize that it’s kind of a big thing. It helps when you can relate to someone on another level.
“So if there’s another person like me out there who hasn’t really seen anybody else like us on this sort of stage with this sport or with winter sports in general, then they might not really think that there’s a place for them.
“But then once they see someone like them, it might give them that extra kick and that extra inspiration to go for it. I’m happy to be a part of that.”
Jackson might not be a podium threat this time, but she plans to compete through another Olympic cycle.
Jackson is still trying to get rid of old inline habits, and skaters around the world should be forewarned by her words.
“The good thing is that I know that I’m still doing a lot of things wrong,” she said. “That’s a good thing, because it means I have a lot to improve on.”