Joey Mantia

Record-breaking skater Joey Mantia was born in Ocala, Fla., on Feb. 7, 1986. As a youth, he enjoyed inline skating for its adrenaline rush. Mantia's parents took him across the U.S. to enter competitions. In the 2003 Pan American Games, Mantia won two gold medals for inline skating despite being the only junior on the track. He won another gold in the 2007 games. He broke numerous inline skating records for road and track races. In 2010, having racked up more than two dozen world titles, Mantia felt he needed a new challenge, and he decided to take up ice skating. He began training in speed skating for the Olympics and worked hard to adjust the instincts he developed on inline skates to the ice. In his first season of competition, Mantia won the 1,500-meter race at the 2013 Berlin World Cup. He participated in the 2014 Winter Olympics but did not win a medal. A new event called the mass start, where up to 24 skaters race together, offered him a chance to dig into his inline skating roots. Two first-place finishes in the mass start during the 2016-17 World Cup season and another victory at the 2017 World Single Distance Championships propelled him toward a spot in the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the first Olympics to incorporate the mass start. Off the track, Mantia invested in the coffee shop Coffee Lab, based at the University of Utah. He enjoys cycling as a hobby and as a supplement to his speed skating training.