MILAN — They’ve trained together almost every day for years, sometimes sacrificing their own individual ambitions in speedskating for the good of the team. They’ve learned to glide around the ice almost perfectly in sync, skates lifting off the ground at the same time on every stride, bodies tilted at the same angle as they scream into the curves.
It was worth the grind for Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman and Ethan Cepuran — even if the Olympic medal earned by the American trio isn’t the one they coveted most.
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Dawson, Lehman and Cepuran settled for silver medals on Tuesday afternoon after advancing to the final of the men’s team pursuit competition but falling to host Italy. The Italians clocked a winning time of 3:39.20 to win the eight-lap final by more than four seconds.
The outcome was bittersweet for a U.S. team that entered the Olympics ranked No. 1 in the world and that had recently dominated the team pursuit discipline. The Americans had skated to three world records, five straight World Cup season-long titles, world championship gold and Olympic bronze over the past five seasons.
The U.S. also advanced to the medal round in women’s team pursuit but fell more than four seconds short against gold-medal favorite Canada in the semifinals. Giorgia Birkeland, Brittany Bowe and Mia Manganello will skate for bronze against Japan later Tuesday evening.
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For the U.S. men, the path to Olympic silver began in an aerodynamics science lab nearly eight years ago. Ingmar Jungnickel, the chair of U.S. Speedskating’s sports science commission, developed a revolutionary new approach to team pursuit that allowed the Americans to shave precious seconds off their fastest times.
Traditionally in team pursuit, the lead skater would peel off the front of the train every lap or two and reattach at the back, eager to have a teammate share the burden of fighting through wind resistance. Through aerodynamic modeling, Jungnickel showed that teams could go faster by leaving one skater at the front for the entire eight-lap race with his two teammates pushing him from behind with their outstretched hands to maintain his momentum.
The U.S. men debuted this new technique at the 2020 World Championships and finished an encouraging fifth, less than four seconds behind the first-place Dutch. The Americans’ time was 12 seconds faster than two years earlier at the Pyeongchang Winter Games when they posted the slowest quarterfinal time and did not reach the medal round.
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By the 2022 Olympics, the rest of the world had caught on. All three medaling teams used the technique pioneered by the Americans. Dawson, Lehman, Cepura and Joey Mantia took bronze, the second Olympic medal that the U.S. men have ever won in the event.
Over the next four years, the U.S. men blossomed into the top team in the world by prioritizing team chemistry on and off the ice. Dawson, Lehman and Cepuran see each other as much as they see their families. They even compete in the same fantasy football league, as evidenced by the unusual items that Dawson has been hauling around this World Cup season.
Dawson is easy to spot in a crowd because of his pink, heart-festooned schoolchild’s backpack and a plastic foot attached to his phone.
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“I lost fantasy football back in the States,” he explained sheepishly soon after he arrived in Milan. “We have a league with all our skaters, and I got last placer.”
Thankfully for Dawson, he’s a little better at skating than he is at fantasy drafts and waiver-wire pickups, so much so that he now has another attention-grabbing accessory to show off.
He’ll return home with an Olympic silver medal around his neck.