D’Amato: Gwen Jorgensen driven to be the best
- Gwen Jorgensen, 30, is a native of Waukesha, Wis.
- She graduated from UW-Madison, where she competed on the track, cross country and swim teams
- She was the 2009 Big Ten champion in the 3,000 and 5,000 meters
- She is a two-time International Triathlon Union world champion and has won a record 17 ITU series races, all since April 2013
Rio de Janeiro – People who worked out alongside Gwen Jorgensen when she lived in a high-rise condominium building on Milwaukee’s east side marveled at how she would set the treadmill on maximum incline and the fastest speed and attack the machine. Her determination alone left them breathless.
Then she would get off and disappear for 10 minutes before returning and resuming a workout that would have brought most to their knees.
“I always wondered what was going on,” said Mike Jacobs, the retired WTMJ-TV news anchor. “Only later did I learn that when she left the workout room, she ran the stairs up to the 28th floor of our building and ran back down to the workout room on the second floor. I was just flabbergasted.”
Poll: Which Olympic sport do you enjoy watching most?
It was no surprise to anyone who knew Jorgensen, a textbook Type A personality who leans toward perfectionism and is allergic to halfhearted effort.
“I think that’s part of who she is,” said her mother, Nancy Jorgensen. “If she’s going to do something, she’s going to try to do it well.”
Her self-motivation, paired with an incredible capacity for hard work and talents in swimming and running, explain Jorgensen’s stunning ascent, in just six years, from neophyte triathlete to best in the world.
The 30-year-old native of Waukesha, Wis., knew almost nothing about the sport when USA Triathlon recruited her while she was at the University of Wisconsin, where she competed in swimming, track and cross country.
“I didn’t even know triathlon was an Olympic sport,” she said. “Triathlon wasn’t on my radar.”
Women's golf on the tee at Olympics
On Saturday, she’ll be on everyone else’s when she goes into the women’s race at the Olympic Games as the gold medal favorite.
Jorgensen is a two-time International Triathlon Union world champion. She has won a record 17 ITU series races, all since April 2013. She won 12 consecutive races over a two-year period. And she won the 2015 Olympic qualification event on the same course at iconic Copacabana Beach that will be used Saturday.
“I have one goal for the year and that is the Rio Olympics on Aug. 20,” Jorgensen said a few weeks before the Games. “My goal has been to win gold for four years.”
***
Joel and Nancy Jorgensen wanted their daughters, Gwen and Elizabeth, to be well-rounded, so they encouraged participation in both athletics and the fine arts in school. Gwen dutifully played violin at Waukesha South High School, but swimming was her passion and she trained with a fervor that concerned her parents.
“She arranged her schedule so she could have the first hour free so she could do two-a-days,” Nancy said. “Even at the time, her coach didn’t recommend that. I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ”
Meanwhile, besides earning straight A’s, Jorgensen rose to first-chair violin and was concertmaster of the high school orchestra.
“As much as she wasn’t thrilled about it,” Nancy said, “she couldn’t prevent herself from doing really well at it.”
Once, when Gwen was in grade school, the Jorgensens sent their daughters to a track camp. The instructor had the campers do a drill in which they ran backward and stressed that he wanted it done at half-speed.
“Well, Gwen ran full speed, of course, and she fell and broke both bones in her arm,” Nancy said. “There, too, she did everything full out.”
Jorgensen, though, didn’t enjoy running. Or, perhaps more accurately, she had a much bigger passion for swimming.
“She loved the relays and the team atmosphere,” Nancy said. “And she also really liked the solitude of being in the lane, quiet, pursuing your own goal.”
Jorgensen’s goal was to someday swim in the Olympics, and if hard work alone had been enough she’d have made it. But though she was an excellent swimmer, she was always one step below elite.
“She was in Wisconsin swimming circles for years,” said Dave Anderson, the co-head coach at the Walter Schroeder Aquatic Center in Brown Deer, Wis. “She was always a top performer — not the very best, but I think when she was 14 she was in the top three in almost all the freestyle events at a state championship meet, and that’s attention-getting.
“Her coach knew her to be nearly obsessed with swim training — early to arrive, begging her parents to go to additional practice.”
When Jorgensen couldn’t beat the top high school swimmers in her own state, however, she knew she was not going to realize her dream. If she couldn’t make national teams, or even junior national teams, she wasn’t going to make Team USA for the Olympic Games.
“So I thought I’d never go to the Olympics,” she said.
Still, she didn’t want to give up swimming and was good enough to make the team at Wisconsin.
“She had an unremarkable Big Ten career,” Anderson said. “But when the team went to Hawaii to train, she would be at the best at the end of that excursion, when everybody else was just dog tired. So there was this idea that she was a fantastic trainer and hard worker, but she wasn’t great at it.”
Olympic athletes with Wisconsin ties
Jorgensen also ran track and cross-country for the Badgers, and that’s where she excelled. She was the 2009 Big Ten champion in the 3,000 and 5,000 meters and qualified for the NCAA championships three times in track and twice in cross-country.
When Barb Lindquist, who ran the college recruitment program for USA Triathlon, asked Wisconsin coaches about potential athletes for the organization’s developmental program, one name kept popping up: Gwen Jorgensen.
“Barb said, ‘We think you can go to the Olympics,’ ” Jorgensen said. “It was all so new and foreign to me that it shocked me.”
She agreed to give it a try. Meanwhile, she took a job at Ernst & Young in Milwaukee — by then she had her master’s degree in accounting and had passed the CPA exam — and started showing up at Schroeder to train. She also ran and biked along the lakefront and zipped around town on a scooter.
“She’s tall (5-foot-10) but slight and she’s still riding her college scooter downtown to go to work,” Anderson said. “I said, ‘You cannot go on like this.’ So I talked to Greg Hobbs at David Hobbs Honda and he gave her a leased car for free.”
Jorgensen’s relationship with Hobbs continues to this day.
“We’re really lucky to be associated with her,” Greg Hobbs said. “She’s doing a bloody amazing job. We talk about it here in the dealership all the time: ‘Hey, we sponsor Gwen Jorgensen.’ Every time she wins a race, we gush over her for a few hours and it’s fun.”
In Jorgensen’s first competitive triathlon, in March 2010, she earned her elite card with an eighth-place finish in a USAT development race in Clermont, Fla.
“My next race was an international competition and I got second there and I was like, ‘Oh, boy, I think I should start focusing on this a little more,’ ” Jorgensen said. “I wanted to do it only if I could be world-class.”
In short order, she was. By 2012 she was a podium threat in ITU races and, two years after her first competitive triathlon, made the U.S. Olympic team.
Jorgensen went to London with hopes to win a medal, but a flat tire during the bike portion of the race relegated her to a 38th-place finish.
In the months afterward, she thought hard about her future in the sport. The flat was a cruel break, yes, but if she truly wanted to be the best in the world she was going to have to make changes. She couldn’t be No. 1 while working part-time at Ernst & Young and training in Milwaukee.
She would have to dedicate her waking hours to being a professional athlete, which meant quitting her job and finding the best possible training environment. Her ability to push herself had always served her well, but now she needed to be pushed by other elite triathletes.
“She’s incredible. Phenomenal. To win every time … it’s mind-boggling.”
- U.S. teammate Greg Billington
She made the difficult decision to leave her comfort zone and work with Jamie Turner, a highly regarded triathlon coach who has training bases in Wollongong, Australia, and Vitoria, Spain.
“Gwen decided after London to up the investment in the sport,” Turner said. “She needed a daily performance environment that suited her needs.”
Jorgensen ostensibly lives in St. Paul, Minn., with husband Patrick Lemieux, a former pro cyclist, but spends only a few weeks a year in the U.S.
“Being away from home was a difficult transition and it was something I was hesitant to do for a long time,” she said. “I wanted to stay at home and be around family. It’s tough to be away but the biggest thing Jamie told me is that it’s an investment and not a sacrifice.”
That investment has paid off handsomely as Jorgensen his risen to the top of her sport.
ITU triathlons are comprised of a 1.5-kilometer swim, 40 kilometers on the bike and a 10K run. Those also are the standard Olympic distances, though the Rio bike course is slightly shorter at 38.5 kilometers.
Jorgensen is at her best in the 10K run, which she dominates. Others can stay with her in the water and on the bike, but none can match her stride for stride. If she gets off the bike anywhere near the lead she wins, and her ability to claw back from big deficits already is the stuff of triathlon folklore.
“She’s incredible. Phenomenal,” said U.S. teammate Greg Billington, who will compete in the men’s triathlon Thursday. “To win every time … it’s mind-boggling.”
Actually, Jorgensen’s streak of 12 consecutive ITU series victories ended April 9, when she finished second to 2011 world champion Helen Jenkins of Great Britain in Australia.
Jorgensen then won races May 14 in Japan, and June 12 in England before finishing third in her last pre-Olympics race, July 16 in Germany. U.S. teammate Katie Zaferes won that race; Jorgensen was 26 seconds off the pace.
“I think everyone is trying to beat me,” she acknowledged. “In an Olympic year, everyone steps up their game even more so. I think people are stepping up and really pushing the limits.”
Some view the recent results as a sign that Jorgensen’s aura of invincibility has cracked slightly, but she isn’t concerned.
“It wasn’t a goal for this year,” she said of the ITU races. “It’s not my focus. My only focus this year is Rio.”