Winter Olympics: Four years after last-lap heartbreak, Kristen Santos-Griswold returns for one more shot at gold

MILAN — Imagine having everything you’ve wished for, everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve trained for, right there in front of you, just a few seconds away. And then imagine losing it all, all at once, through no fault of your own.

Team USA speed skater Kristen Santos-Griswold, who will compete Thursday in the 500-meter event, has spent the past four years trying to skate out from under a cloud of what-if. Four years ago in Beijing, Santos, at her first Olympics, was leading on the final lap of the 1000m medal race. A gold medal was just a lap away.

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And then Italy’s Arianna Fontana attempted a daring move, diving inside Santos-Griswold to attempt to capture the lead. The two skaters became entangled and spun out on the ice. Fontana’s move was later deemed illegal, but that wasn’t enough to give Santos-Griswold a medal; Olympic records will always show she finished fourth, just off the podium.

“The hardest part about this sport,” Santos-Griswold said recently, “is that kind of concept of, you can be the best, you can be the fastest, and things just don’t work out for you.”

Already older than most of her competitors, with another heartbreaking near-miss in her history — a badly-timed injury cost her a probable spot in the 2018 Olympics — Santos-Griswold knew her best chance at an Olympic medal might have just shattered on the Beijing ice.

But she also knew she still had more to give to this maddening, exhilarating sport.

The long road back from Beijing

“After 2022 was really hard. I’m not going to lie, I had to take a little bit of a step back from the sport and really reflect and decide if it was something that I wanted to keep doing,” she said. “I couldn’t really talk to my family that much or other people because everyone’s got an opinion about what you should do. I really needed to make that decision for myself.”

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She spent months wrestling with the decision of whether to commit another four years to the Olympics, weighing the pros and cons of shaping her life around another moment that could slip right from her fingers. But in the end, the decision was obvious.

“I knew if I stepped away at that moment,” she says, “I would regret it forever.”

What followed for Santos-Griswold was an intense period of self-examination, an attempt to understand why exactly her entire identity was wrapped up in being a skater. She began figure skating in Connecticut at age 3, then switched to speed skating at 9 when she saw races on the Disney Channel. And from that day to now, at age 31, Santos-Griswold’s life has focused on and revolved around speed skating.

“The concept of being an athlete, and being specifically a speed skater, has really defined my whole life,” Santos-Griswold says. “And thinking that you’re done with that, and no longer going to be an athlete, can be really daunting.”

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Seeing that end coming — combined with the acceptance of the inherent unfair nature of speed skating — helped clarify her understanding of how to prepare for Milan.

“Every day [leading up to Beijing], I thought about the Olympics. Every single thing I did was like, how is this going to affect me at the Olympics?” she recalls. “I ate right. I slept right. I trained right. I did everything right and it still didn’t happen for me.”

The solution, then, was to begin the long, slow separation of self from skater. She began to focus on the journey rather than the destination, enjoying the moments that “normal,” non-Olympians appreciate all the time — going out for an unscheduled bite to eat, taking a day off training to attend a friend’s wedding. Standard days for the rest of us, stark breaks with training and regimentation for Olympians.

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She also had to put 2022 into context of the rest of her life. “I was definitely angry. I was upset. I was resentful. It feels unfair,” she says. “It’s so unfair to be so close to be in the last lap of the 1000, be about to medal, and get taken out.”

Acceptance of that moment, and of the sport that led to it, helped her heal from the pain of the loss. “I chose the sport. I chose to be there every day on the ice. And I think that that’s something that makes the sport that much more exciting,” she says. “Every win is that much more special. Because you didn’t just overcome the physical things for it. You overcame so many mental aspects. And you had to adapt so much within a single race.”

The fire returned, and so did the wins

Soon enough, a funny thing happened — she won, and kept on winning. In 2024, she became the first American short-track speed skater to capture world championship medals at all three individual distances (500m, 1000m and 1500m) at the same event since speed skating became an Olympic sport in 1992. The next year, she won her first Crystal Globe, awarded to the best overall short-track skater, and ended the season ranked No. 1 in the world.

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In 2025, she also finally watched a replay of the catastrophic Beijing race for the first time since it occurred. She wept, feeling the pain of the moment, but she also saw the possibilities and the missed opportunities in the race, too. She was in position to medal, yes, but perhaps she could have positioned herself better … or perhaps there was nothing she could have done whatsoever. Sometimes, things just go sideways.

And now, starting with this week’s 500m event, she’s racing with a new mantra: Untouchable. To her, that means her goal now is “to be ahead, and so far ahead that no one could affect my race,” she says. “This sport is really unpredictable, and a lot that you can’t control. The best way to control other people is to make it so they can’t even affect how you’re going to race.”

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Kristen Santos-Griswold isn’t the same racer she was in 2022. She’s married, she has a college degree, she freely admits that she doesn’t have the energy of her younger teammates. She’s full into her “work smarter, not harder” era.

And yet, she’s also more centered than she’s ever been, more willing to put in the hard work without a guarantee of a result, and accept that which she cannot change.

“I had to really sit there and think, if in four years the same thing happens again, would that be worth it?” she says. “Obviously, I’m here. So I did decide that it would be.”