How Brandon Kim Races Like He Has Everything to Gain and Nothing to Lose

By Amy Wotovich

On a given week during the school year, Brandon Kim doesn't touch the ice at all. He represented the United States at the 2026 Winter Olympic Games and holds the American national record in men’s short track speed skating in the 500m. Ironic, right?

Kim is a full-time student at Stanford. To his dismay, he has no rink at Stanford nor team to train with. "There's no ice rink at school and no team" he said. "So really, I'm just training in the weight room, and doing, kind of my own training on land, just to kind of mimic the feeling on the ice."

"When I'm at school, I'm really not skating at all, and then I fly out on Wednesday before competing on, say, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So I've got two days to, you know, get everything together and remind myself how to skate again before I jump in and race."

In a sport where "the ice feel is so important," Kim steps away from the ice for stretches most short trackers would consider career-threatening. "In short track, I think, especially, taking that time off, even one or two weeks, can make a big impact on your performance. But I am taking, you know, 6 weeks off at a time before competing...I don't really know anyone else that's really done that in short track."

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When asked how he balances a Stanford course load against an Olympic training regimen, Kim describes a hierarchy.

"When I'm at school, I'm a student first, so I focus on my academics, and then I train when I have time, but in that time, I definitely, you know, really dial in and make sure that I'm getting everything I need." He’s entirely at peace with that arrangement. "I kind of just do what I have to do," he said of training alone, without a coach or teammates nearby. "I don't, like, make my workouts too long or anything like that. I'm in and out, and I just kind of do what I have to do."

He’s student first, athlete second. His identity was never 100% rooted in being a speed skater, and he's said as much about the shape of his athletic career: he kept assuming, at each new life stage, that it would end. “I think when I was little, I never imagined that I would still be skating now," he said. "I initially thought maybe I would be done once I go to high school, and then when I got to high school, I kept skating, and then I was like, alright, when I go to college, you know, I'll probably stop skating, but, here I am."

When asked if he ever considered stopping at those inflection points, he shrugged. “Not really,” he said, "I kind of just take it, like, one year at a time. In those moments, I just kind of, like, one season at a time. I don't wanna, you know, think too far ahead. I kind of just, like, take it step by step. Just little by little."

Even now, he frames his future in the sport as a standing option he keeps renewing. This mindset is exactly what helped Kim walk into the 2026 Olympic quad without the weight that crushes so many athletes at his level. It was a different approach than the one he took in 2022, falling short of making the team after taking a gap year specifically to train for the Games.

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Kim went into the next four years knowing full well he'd never be able to out-train his competition. Instead of treating his schedule as a limitation to overcome, he looked at it like a reason the outcome couldn't really hurt him.

"I really had nothing to lose," he said. "Every bit of success was something I could only gain. And if I didn’t do well, it really wasn’t too bad on my end, because I'm away from the ice,” he continued, “And if I did do well, then, you know, it's great, because I'm beating people that are training 40 hours a week."

Comparatively speaking, his training deficit is absurd: "Other athletes are training 40 hours a week with ice time and everything, and I'm, you know, spending 5 to 7 hours in the gym a week, and I'm still able to compete with them." He's explicit about the psychological payoff. "Given that mindset, it just kind of took some pressure off, and I felt like I was able to, you know, just make the most out of every opportunity."

Psychologically speaking, Kim has a mindset of outcome independence. Since his sense of self isn’t wrapped up in his skating results, he’s able to adopt this “nothing to lose” mentality.

What lets that work, though, is his trust in time logged on ice throughout childhood. "Our sport is determined by such a small amount, it can be like a thousandth of a second," Kim said, "so we're training all year just to get that thousandth of a second better." Kim relies on his foundation on ice built over more than a decade and shows up to chase speed when it matters most.

The key takeaway from his story is to build a durable foundation so that when life gets busy and priorities change, your lifetime of preparation does the work that daily obsession doesn’t have to.