University of Utah Health Professionals Help U.S. Skaters Find the Fast Track in Partnership Program

Three years before short track skater Kristen Santos-Griswold competed in her first Olympic Winter Games in 2022, she was told her skating career was over due to a back injury that needed surgery.

“I would have been done skating,” Santos-Griswold said.

Then, she met Jason Miller, a physical therapist with University of Utah Health. It changed her life. The surgery never happened. An Olympic run did.

“I was going to him pretty much every single day for a couple months,” Santos-Griswold said, “and ended getting through it without surgery. He was really great at making sure that the workouts and exercises that I was doing for rehab were also still hard exercises where I felt like I was improving in some way.”

The first time Santos-Griswold returned to the ice for a World Cup event, she set an American Record. She went on to make the U.S. Olympic Team for the 2022 Beijing Games and nearly reached the podium, finishing fourth in the Women’s 1000m.

Since then the Fairfield, Connecticut, native has won her first World Title in 2024 and the Crystal Globe in 2024-25. Now she’s looking ahead to a second Olympic Winter Games in February in Milano, Italy.

Santos-Griswold’s remarkable story is just one piece of a partnership between University of Utah Health and US Speedskating that formally went into place in 2020 but existed eight years before that.

The program provides US Speedskating athletes with an open door into the university’s health system for care and physical therapy. And when US Speedskating athletes hit the road for global events, physical therapists and physicians from University of Utah Health are right there with them. Among those professionals are Miller, who has worked with the team since 2017.

“It’s a game changer,” said Shane Domer, the chief of sport performance for US Speedskating.

“We have these physicians that come out and cover competitions. They travel with us on the road. They’re just an incredible partner.”

The health center is the only academic medical center in Utah and serves the entire Mountain West region. University of Utah Health includes five hospitals and 12 community health care centers, including the South Jordan Health Center that’s just 10 miles from the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns.

In addition to US Speedskating, University of Utah Health has a partnership with U.S. Ski & Snowboard.

“Our athletes get in, they get seen, they get taken care of with specialists,” Domer said. “There’s just this small army of people over at the University of Utah helping us out. It’s incredible.

“I think every single person’s been touched by the University of Utah.”

Certainly, Santos-Griswold is one of them. Even this year, she has been recovering from a back injury that slowed her at the beginning of the World Tour season. By the second weekend of World Tour competition in Montreal, she won a pair of Bronze medals.

“With injuries we get with skating, University of Utah Health has been absolutely phenomenal for that,” she said. “I’ve had back injuries, broken clavicle, broken foot, a lot. All this stuff. U of U Health has been really, really great in the care that we receive and facilitating the best type of care.”

If that care can’t be done in a clinical setting, doctors and therapists come out to the rink.

“I’ve been really lucky, for instance, with the compartment syndrome,” Santos-Griswold said. “It’s something that I only have issues with when I skate. So, going into the clinic and getting the tests done to confirm whether it’s that or not wouldn’t have really worked for me because it’s something I feel skating. They came out to the rink and had a doctor doing these tests on me rinkside, like between sets of skating.”

Among those joining Miller on the path toward the Olympic Games Milano Cortina 2026 are Trevor Kelsey, an athletic trainer who is traveling to global competitions, and Dr. Christopher Gee, who’ll be the team physician for the Olympic teams. Dr. Joy English was the chief medical officer for the long track World Cup event held Nov. 14-16 in Kearns. They join a US Speedskating medical staff that includes Short Track Medical Manager Anne Hinley and Long Track Head Athletic Trainer Fikre Wondafrash.

The University of Utah Health experience led Santos-Griswold not only to high levels in her skating but onto a path that has her in the third year of a doctorate program in physical therapy at the University of Utah.

One day, Santos-Griswold could be the physical therapist working with the US Speedskating teams.

“We will be lucky to have her,” Domer said. “She’s fantastic, not only as an athlete but as a person. I know her drive and I know how good she’s going to be as a physical therapist.”

When the season ends next spring, Santos-Griswold will head back to the university to participate in clinicals during the final year of her doctorate program, a procedure in which she will work as a physical therapist but under the supervision of doctors.

“I think being able to skate and do school is something that I’ve honestly been really lucky to do because I think it’s made me that much more knowledgeable in both schooling and my sport,” Santos-Griswold said. “A lot of things in school, I can relate back to skating and a lot of things in skating I can relate back to my schooling. Knowing what’s going to get me recovered properly, what’s going to do this, what good pain is versus what bad pain is, what type of modalities I think I would need to recover faster, what the best thing to do is.

“I’ve been in the shoes of a patient so many times, so I’ve really learned not just the knowledge that you need for it, but that emotional aspect that you need for it.”

Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic and Paralympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to USSpeedskating.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.