The 2026 Olympic Winter Games are about to begin, bringing more than two weeks of elite competition in sixteen sports, including Alpine skiing, bobsleigh, curling, figure skating, ice hockey, and speed skating. On February 6, San Siro Stadium in Milan will host the opening ceremony, and among those hoisting flags for their country is an athlete from a place hardly known for winter recreation: sunny Florida.
Speed skater Erin Jackson will lead Team USA into the stadium alongside bobsledder and Maine native Frank Del Duca, an honor bestowed by a vote from their teammates. Following the ceremony, the speed skating competitions will run from February 7 to February 21, with Jackson competing in the 1000-meter race on Monday, February 9, and the 500-meter race on Sunday, February 15.
Ahead of the games, here’s what to know about the Florida native and University of Florida grad.
She started skating in her hometown of Ocala as a kid.
At around eight years old, Jackson took to strapping plastic skates onto her shoes to zoom around her driveaway. Then she started hanging out at the skating rink with friends, quickly realized she “loved going fast,” and got into speed skating on wheels at age ten.
But it took her a while to get on the ice.
Originally Jackson was an inline skater; she competed for fifteen years in roller speed skating, collecting twelve world championship medals and forty-seven national titles. In 2017 she moved to Utah and got on the ice for the first time, and four months later she competed in the Olympic trials for the 2018 games in South Korea—just to see where she stood. She shocked the skating world, and herself, by qualifying.
Milan-Cortina will be her third Olympics—and she’s already a gold medalist.
In South Korea in 2018, Jackson skated to 24th place out of 31 competitors in the women’s 500-meter sprint. But by the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022, she had skyrocketed to the top, taking gold in the 500 with a time of 37.04 seconds.
She’s the first Black woman to win gold in an individual sport in the Winter Olympics.
Plus, her 2022 win broke a medal drought for the country, representing Team USA’s first individual medal in women’s speed skating since 2010. See a video of the history-making race here. Jackson hopes her success will inspire more Black athletes to compete in winter sports.
She shares the ice with close friend and fellow Floridian Brittany Bowe.
The Sunshine State is well represented on Team USA. Jackson grew up admiring fellow Ocala native Brittany Bowe, who is four years older. They met for the first time in 2002, and Jackson counts Bowe—a world-champion inline skater, a college basketball player, and now a speed skater with two Olympic bronze medals of her own—as a mentor, inspiration, and great friend. In an incredibly moving gesture, Bowe actually gave up her spot to Jackson in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing after Jackson slipped at the trials and finished third. (Both women ended up competing when a spot opened later.)
Jackson jokes that she “owes her career to Waffle House.”
When she was young, she and her family often ate at Waffle House, and it was there that Jackson’s mother got to talking with someone who just happened to be a skating coach (Renee Hildebrand) about her daughter’s love of being on wheels and going fast—and the rest is history.
Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina.
