Olympic Diary: U.S. speedskater Joey Mantia living his life to the extreme

SALT LAKE CITY – Late on a frosty night in mid-December, behind guarded gates and nestled on the swanky hillside estate where the city’s moneyed elite look down on the lovely State Capitol building, one heck of a party was cranking into life.

The mansion hosting it was pretty enough already, even without the squeaky-clean layer of snow and the giant front-yard trees wrapped in multi-colored lights. Inside, a hip Utah who’s who enjoyed the generosity of the host, a local grocery chain heir. A dotcom tycoon chatted with a professional soccer player, a dreadlocked nomad fresh from spiritual peace in Nepal shared stories with a human rights lawyer, a pair of Eastern European fashion models flirted with an NBA agent and, let’s be honest now, impossibly attractive women were everywhere.

Beside a hand-crafted pool table and a lounge filled with more big screens than a Vegas sports book, just along from a kitchen island big enough to need its own zip code, an Olympic gold-medal prospect was having his last night out ahead of February’s Winter Games.

Joey Mantia is a long-track speedskater who can feel comfortable amid such trendy company. Not only is he a world champion but he was handpicked by Armani as having the looks and cache to star in one of its international commercials.

He started chatting to a journalist, me, who was realistically neither cool nor well-dressed enough to be present, but who’d been invited along by a generous friend. The topic of conversation started out with trivialities. Television shows, British gangster movies, airline miles programs. Now though, it was on to obsession, in all its forms.

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Mantia trains like a beast, with workouts that are outrageous in both their content and duration. Off the ice his investments, his hobbies, his friendships, all take place at full speed too. Nothing he does is half-hearted. Well, almost nothing.

As the clock ticked past midnight and more partiers arrived, Mantia finished the beer he’d been sipping and readied to leave. The partying could wait. The Olympics won’t.

Before parting ways, Mantia and I agreed to keep in contact, and over the weeks that followed, we did. The plan was for him to unload his thoughts every couple of days, by text message, WhatsApp or email, so I could document his mindset during what would be the most critical time of his career. Mantia is a deep thinker; you could say that he obsesses over obsession. He knows that his inner drive is his greatest strength, propelling his body to strive for more and push itself past the limits of pain and exhaustion. He also senses that, if not channeled properly, it could be his most pressing weakness.

Sometimes it was a detailed chat that went deep into his thoughts on life and its meaning. On other occasions it might be a quick note to sum up the anticipation of competition.

Jan. 2

“Getting chills listening to the commentators talk about the Olympics… Palms are sweaty as I write this text. I can’t get enough of this stuff. PUT ME ON THE LINE!”

In the first week of January, Mantia cut a swath through the Olympic trials. He came to Pyeongchang as one of the favorites in the 3,000-meter mass start, while also competing in the 1,500, Friday night’s 1,000 and as the leader of the U.S. men’s pursuit trio.

His writings had started with details of training that were sometimes dry, but as our conversations continued a friendship developed, a sense of trust grew and subjects ran a spectrum from the plight of stray dogs to homophobic bullying he suffered as a child. Mantia, who turns 32 on Feb. 7, is straight. As a fourth-grader in Ocala, Fla., however, his excellence as a junior inline skater made him a target for cruel jibes from other children. They tormented him over the tight clothing inliners wear, calling him “gay blade” and other slurs.

Jan. 15

“That year I was in 4th grade was brutal. (But) I liked (inline) and I was good at it. And when I was doing it I felt like a king.

“That feeling ultimately beat out the need to impress the neighborhood (expletive)s who would pick on me.”

He burned inside back then, dreamed of causing pain to his verbal attackers, confused at what drove a pack of individuals to deliberately inflict hurt on another. Now, he mixes his uncomfortable boyhood memories with humor and remembers trying to land a local lad in trouble around that time. Aged 10, Mantia pilfered a can of spray paint from his family shed and, pleased with his idea, daubed the boy’s name on the wall of a nearby house. But it was Mantia who got busted, not his nemesis Leonard, whom, it was reasonably suggested, would have probably remembered the ‘o’ in his name had he indeed been the culprit.

Mantia misses the liberty of inline, the chance to just go outside and skate, to roar down Swiss mountains at 50 mph. His income as an inliner, where he won a record 28 world titles, topped six figures. In long track, which he switched to in 2011 as part of a search for a new challenge, he makes far less, even as one of the world’s elite. He doesn’t regret the decision and Olympic hardware would reinforce it further, but there are gloomy days and introspective nights.

The Utah Olympic Oval just outside Salt Lake City is his training home but also his prison, the four walls containing America’s best long-track training environment, including a giant inline treadmill, but also a total absence of variety.

Jan. 14

“Everyday I’m confined to the Oval, the scenery never changes. When I’m struggling with the track, I miss how natural inline was for me.”

Back to the obsession. It is a part of his entire existence. He had a year when he documented every single item of food and drink that he consumed, finding the experience powerful but restrictively intense. He backed off a little, meaning that an occasional beer is OK. When I returned to Salt Lake after trials, we went for an Indian curry, at a restaurant which allows patrons to select their level of spiciness. Adventurous types opt for a butt-kicking “8”. Lunatics go for a “10”. Mantia asks for “an Indian 10.”

All long trackers cycle a lot, but none as much as him. He treks out into the Utah wilderness, and once rode unaided for 147 miles up seven mountains in a single day, a climb of 16,000 feet. A usual session might encompass 50 miles. It has a practical purpose but also frees him a little.

Last September he bought his first house, a fixer-upper in Sandy, Utah. His father, Joe Sr., moved in with him. The pair is renovating the entire interior, electrics, plumbing, the works. This means that in the six months leading up to the Olympics, Mantia has been living in spartan conditions. Financing the property was a stretch as he had no credit and no way of proving his income, which is contingent on performance. But it was the right house and the right price and therefore the right time. If he’d sat and waited until after the Games, he’d have missed out on the equity realized from a sharp jump in the area’s prices over the past few months.

Jan. 16

“Pretty much rebuilding the whole house minus the outside walls.”

Rogers: “And living there at the same time, right?”

“Yea it sucks.”

Rogers: “Hahaha”

“Living in a freezing basement. With blue carpet lol.”

Timing an opportunity will be crucial to his hopes in Pyeongchang, too. Mantia is reigning world champion in the mass start, an event often described as “NASCAR on ice” and which will be making its Olympic debut at Gangneung Olympic Oval on Saturday. At worlds, on the same rink, Mantia tucked himself into a breakaway group, stayed loose, then blazed away to victory over the final two laps.

Even his social media habits trend toward the extreme. He loves dogs, but the realities of training and travel are such that it would be irresponsible to own one. So he follows dog accounts on Instagram. Like, 100 of them.

He enjoys stand-up comedy shows to avert stress, not one or two episodes but binge sessions of hours at a time — Dave Chappelle, Jim Jefferies, Louis C.K.

He taught himself to play piano for soothing purposes, learning from a series of YouTube videos. His dream is to own a top of the range Steinway, the likes of which he has found ingenious ways to play for free. In Milwaukee, he went into a showroom armed with an elaborate story about having $15,000 to spend on a new piano for him and his musician girlfriend for their new home in Waukesha. The salesman set him up at a baby grand, and left him be to play for 45 minutes of bliss. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, didn’t have $15,000 to spare, and his only link to Waukesha is a buddy who lives there. If the salesman is reading this, he should know Mantia does feel bad about it.

He reads and thinks and when he’s not thinking about something new he is thinking about how much he thinks.

Being great at an individual sport can be a lonely spot, but is even more solitary when you’re smart enough to understand there is no easy fix for the mental isolation — other than failure to bring you back to the pack.

Dec. 29

“I drive myself crazy with obsession when things aren’t going according to plan. Why am I not getting it? What am I doing wrong? And we’re told not to obsess ... but why? It hasn’t killed me yet. It hasn’t forced me to quit. Sure it makes each loss twice as hard to handle, but it always makes me come back stronger. It always allows me to discover new motivation. Come to think of it, I’ve never heard anyone tell somebody with a gold medal around their neck that they should have obsessed less about being the best.”

On New Year’s Eve, just before trials, Mantia was asleep in bed, in a Milwaukee hotel room, by 10 p.m. He claimed not to mind, but I wasn’t so sure. Later, when I sent him a photo of a beer and a gorgeous view on my getaway to Arizona, he jokingly responded with a colorful acronym.

Dec. 31

“It’s not easy on the social life when you’re an Olympic speed skater. Looking back, if I could trade in the just a few of the nights I stayed home to recover, or get ready for the next workout, or to watch skating film instead of going out and partying with friends, I wouldn’t give up a single one. Competition is a game of math. You add up your gains, subtract your setbacks, and whoever brings the bigger number to the starting line will win gold medals.”

It is hard to think that there are many skaters, even those from the sport’s power base in the Netherlands, whose math stacks up larger. Two weeks earlier, Mantia’s coach Matt Kooreman gave the U.S. squad a list of four workouts and suggested they select one or two. Once he got rolling, Mantia completed all four, spending more than seven straight hours at the rink before collapsing into bed.

Dec. 18

“Gonna sleep well tonight.”

He doesn’t always. A few evenings later he lay awake, unable to shift his thoughts from skating. Eventually, with the help of a visualization technique he nodded off and drifted immediately into a dream. About skating.

Dec. 22

“When I woke up, those thoughts felt so much more natural and automatized. Maybe it was coincidence, but today’s ice session felt incredible.”

Experts in long track say that Mantia has freakish talent, in a sport full of freakish physical specimens, spurred by maniacal willpower. On the first day of the year, he tried to find parallels between his profession and other sports, struggling to land upon one that was equally unforgiving.

Jan. 1

“Speed skating 101: It’s like teeing up a few dozen golf balls one after another and trying to drive each one to the same exact spot on the fairway every single time. The race side of the sport is like driving all 36 balls as fast as you possibly can without varying in accuracy or consistency. The physical side is doing all that as your heart rate approaches its max and your legs start burning from lactic acid. And as a bonus, if you DO end up falling short on the accuracy/consistency with those drives, you get exponentially more tired each time you do.”

That’s the challenge that faces him in Pyeongchang and he’s ready for it, this little window of opportunity in an event that is his best (he also placed eighth in the 1500) but is also wildly unpredictable. Yet it provides the scope for vindication of all that effort, all those decisions to take the tougher path. Validation for all those nights in. Reward for all those gut-busting, leg burning sessions.

Silence, once and for all, to the vicious voices from his childhood.

After that he doesn’t know what next.

The obsession for living his best life won’t change, he knows that much. He hankers for the freedom of travel and might take a backpack and inline skates and jet off to nowhere in particular to teach kids how to go fast. He might go another four-year Olympic cycle, might dip back into inline racing, might buy more houses to renovate or none of the above. Certainty is nice, but to rely on it is dangerous, and he doesn’t.

From what I see he is a man at peace, perhaps more than he realizes amid the myriad thoughts that populate an Olympian’s mind at crunch time. The obsession has been in the pursuit of success rather than the prize itself; even if Mantia has the kind of golden Olympics of his dreams he’s not the type to sit stroking his medals and living off it forever.

His future will surely feature obsession, hopefully the right kind, regardless of what happens. But this much is for sure, whether he medals or not he knows it won’t be for a shortage of trying, and there is satisfaction in that. Either way, he’ll come back home and have a party. And, this time, he won’t leave early.