Race the Round You're In: The Mindset Shift Behind Corinne Stoddard's Olympic Bronze

By Amy Wotovich

Every athlete has an origin story, and Corinne Stoddard's begins as a six-year-old in a school gym class doing a roller-skating unit. Her class capped it off with a trip to a local rink. "I didn't know what a skating rink was," Stoddard said. "My first time there, I was, like, instantly in love. I loved that there was a place to go roller skating not just at school a couple days a week."

She started begging her parents every day after school to take her to the rink's public session. Eventually the rink's owner noticed. "The owner of the rink started noticing that I was coming, like, really often, and that I was pretty good at skating," she said. "And he asked me if I wanted to try speed skating."

Her answer was immediate: "Of course, I said yes. It sounded fun, I enjoyed it, and I was totally into the one-lap race they would have." Stoddard didn't know what the Olympics were yet. She "just liked to skate”.

This simple love for the sport has carried Stoddard through her career, but it's also the thing she nearly lost heading into the 2026 Winter Olympics.

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Stoddard's Olympic debut came during the pandemic in 2022. With empty stadiums, no spectators, and strictly confined athlete schedules, "it kind of almost felt like a World Championships or a World Cup. There definitely wasn't that Olympic atmosphere."

That first “Games-as-a-rep” pattern, she explained, is common for American short-track speed skaters, in contrast to nations that fast-track a single young star: "Some countries, you know, they bring this 18-year-old kid to the Games that goes and wins everything and then you never see them again."

Team USA doesn't work that way. "We usually have the same team for a few quads," Stoddard said. "And every year, people get better and better. In the States, towards the end of your career is kind of when you peak."

After her Olympic debut, Stoddard “got really motivated to be the best in the world by 2026.” Her results took off and she rapidly climbed world standings. She credits both a shift in her own work ethic ("I was kind of just riding it out before”) and the influence of teammate Kristen Santos-Griswold, who was already among the best in the world.

"I saw [Kristen] come from the very bottom all the way to the top," Stoddard said. "I knew I could too." The two became close friends and launched a joint Instagram account poking fun at their own pre-Olympic anxieties, turning shared mental health struggles (sleeplessness, injuries, and the mounting weight of an Olympic year) into something they could laugh about together rather than carry alone.

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By the time the 2026 Games arrived, Stoddard had climbed to No. 2 in the world, medaling in nine of twelve races that season and reaching the A final in every one of them. It was the best season of her career.

"I knew I was going to the Olympics with a lot of eyes on me, and also knew myself that I had a huge potential to medal in every distance, you could say. So, I had a lot of pressure on myself." Asked directly whether that pressure came from others or from herself, she didn't hesitate: "For me, it's totally self-imposed. Like, it's all because of me and what I expect out of myself."

What happened next is something she'd never experienced before. "The Olympics were totally terrible for me in terms of results and how I had been performing in the lead up. It was really weird. Like, I've always been able to perform under pressure." She describes it feeling like her body was physically shutting down: "I would just go on the ice, and it felt like all the blood would leave my body, especially my legs, and I couldn't feel my legs. I was just numb. I couldn't move, I couldn't skate, I couldn't perform, and I would just end up crashing."

Behind it was fear, amplified by the size of the stage. "It was the first time I had ever had that many people in a stadium watching me," she said, "and then after I failed once it felt like everybody was watching to see me fail."

That fear was compounded by a wave of online abuse. "I was also getting a ton of hate online," she said. "Just crazy hate comments and talking horribly about me and saying I should basically quit the sport because I'm a failure and an embarrassment." The cycle fed itself. "Every time I stepped on the ice, it was just that much more likely for me to fail again, because I was just worried about not failing again. It's kind of like when people say, like, don't think of a pink unicorn, and then, you can't not think of a pink unicorn."

She's honest about what that week was like. "It was horrible. It was definitely the worst week of my life, and that year had already been the worst year of my life in terms of my mental health. So then, having my worst week ever be at the Olympics was just the cherry on top.”

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Stoddard had four days before her final race of the Games, the 1500m. It was enough time (barely) to reset. She debated scratching the race entirely. But then started thinking: “if I don't race the 1500m, I'm just going to regret it, because that would mean I’m quitting. And I've never been someone who quits. So, I knew I had to do it for my own mental sake."

What got her back on the ice was lowering the stakes. “I got in this mindset of, okay, it can’t get any worse. If I go out there and fail again, well, everyone still thinks the same of me. So it really can’t get any worse. So I might as well go out there and try.”

So, she shrank the goal down to something manageable. In the first round, her only focus was to stay relaxed and finish the race without crashing. She intentionally didn’t think about the podium at all. "At that point, I literally didn’t care where I ended up," she said. "I just wanted to be able to make it through a race without crashing."

She won the round. In the semifinal, she took the same approach: stay relaxed, skate like herself. She advanced again.

By the final (her first individual final of the Games) she'd already accomplished what success looked like on that day. "That was a big win in itself," she said. "I was able to prove to myself that I could skate."

From there, she led almost the entire race, hammering from the front. “It's so hard being out front, but I held on for bronze.” Racing round by round, rather than fixating on the finish line, is what finally got her, her long-awaited podium moment.

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Stoddard's story isn't really about her bronze medal. It's really about how she picked herself back up in the four days in between, and chose to strip an overwhelming goal of “I want a medal, I want a medal, I want a medal” into bite-sized increments. She set a manageable goal and remembered her six-year-old self who simply loved the ice and wanted any reason to keep going back to the rink.

Oftentimes, the best way to chase a goal is not to think harder about the outcome. It’s to shrink your focus back down to the step directly ahead, and to remember why you started. Race the round you’re in, one step at a time.

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