Long Track National Team Coach Ryan Shimabukuro Helps Get U.S. Skaters Up to Speed in Olympic Year

When U.S. long track skaters headed to the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee in late September for a training camp to start an Olympic season, everything happens indoors.

It wasn’t always that way, a reminder they may get from longtime Olympic coach and former speed skater Ryan Shimabukuro.

“I skated out there when it was outdoors,” said Shimabukuro, a native of Hawaii who skated in Milwaukee for 14 years and now serves as U.S. Long Track National Team Coach. “We didn’t have the luxury of the Pettit, where it’s indoors. I skated when it was 60 degrees below zero one day with the wind chill.”

It wasn’t 60 below in September in Milwaukee, so no worries there. But there will be plenty of work to be done. This is an Olympic year. American skaters are coming off a 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing in which they won medals in three events, including a Gold medal by Erin Jackson in the Women’s 500m.

“I always use our Milwaukee camps in the fall as a nice springboard going into our Trials and then heading into the international World Cup fall season,” Shimabukuro said.

The World Cup season begins Nov. 14 at the Utah Olympic Oval in Kearns. The U.S. Olympic Team Trials are set for the first week in January at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee.

The road toward the Milano Cortina Games really began long ago. About four years back. It is the Shimabukuro way.

“What people have to understand is just because it’s an Olympic year, the mindset doesn’t change,” Shimabukuro said. “Every year we have the World Championships, we have the World Cup circuit, which are just as important. The United States puts a lot more emphasis on the Olympic Games, and I understand why, but from an athletic performance standpoint, it’s really no different than any other year. The preparation for the Games started at the beginning of the quad (in 2023).”

U.S. skaters have done that work. Jordan Stolz has won nine World Championships medals the last three years, including six Gold medals. The Men’s Pursuit team of Casey Dawson, Emery Lehman and Ethan Cepuran won a World Championship last season after winning a Bronze medal in the 2022 Olympics. Four U.S. women posted fifth-place finishes at the 2022 World Championships: Brittany Bowe, Jackson, Mia Manganello and Greta Myers.

Shimabukuro says he has a four-year plan for each athlete he coaches, and every race means something.

“You can’t underestimate any opponent,” he said. “Every opportunity must be taken, so coming into this season I treat every time they go to the line for a race, whether it’s a weekend time trial or US Championship or World Cup or the Olympic Games, you know, the track is the same, the same distance, the races that they compete in are the same distances. In Milan, it’s going to be a different atmosphere in the sense that the media attention gives it. That’s really the only difference that the Olympic Games bring, other than the fact that we’re going to be skating in a venue that we haven’t skated in before.

“But we’ve already proven that we’re able to overcome that, being in Beijing four years ago. We didn’t get to skate in that venue until the actual Olympics. We’ve been through that before.”

Shimabukuro is entering his sixth Olympics as a coach, and his fifth with US Speedskating. The nine skaters he coaches directly are Bowe, Jackson, Sarah Warren, McKenzie Browne and Chrysta Rands-Evans on the women’s side, and Cooper McLeod, Austin Kleba, Conor McDermott-Mostowy and Zach Stoppelmoor on the men’s side.

“The Olympic Games is obviously special,” Shimabukuro said. “Each one of them has been different and unique in its own way. To represent the United States in the greatest sporting event in the world, it’s a feeling I never get tired of.”

In addition to skating, hitting the books also figures into preparation for the Olympic Games. Shimabukuro said he partners with Nick Galli, a mental performance coach at U.S. Speedskating and the University of Utah, for a book club he participates in with the athletes. This year’s emphasis is emotional agility.

“It’s not only good for team bonding,” Shimabukuro said, “but also just getting a chance to connect with the skaters on the team and them to connect with me, and some of our staff members, on a different level. Like anything, a lot of it is mental. Being able to address certain situations that you may not recognize or expect, it’s really important to be prepared for.”

“I feel like, through the book clubs we’ve done, it’s been very helpful in maturing a lot of our skaters.”

Shimabukuro began his tenure with U.S. Speedskating in 1998 as Midwest Region Development Coach in Milwaukee. Four years later, he was named head coach of the National Sprint Team, although he did not coach in the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City in 2002 because he was still coach of the Junior National Team. He made his Olympic debut in 2006, when Joey Cheek won a Gold medal in the Men’s 500m and Silver in the 1000m.

Since then, the only Olympics that Shimabukuro wasn’t a U.S. national coach was 2018, when he was National Team coach for Colombia and also a coach in the ISU Transition Program. The Transition Program, which helped inline skaters on wheels transition into skaters on ice, was based at the Utah Olympic Oval. At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Shimabukuro coached five skaters from three countries, including Jackson. He returned to U.S. Speedskating after that in a head coaching role.

“I was blessed just to be able to be head coach at one (Olympics), and now to go to my sixth Games, five of them with U.S. Speedskating, I’m pretty honored and blessed to have this opportunity to represent my country at the highest level,” Shimabukuro said.

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.