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Maame Biney bounces back from Olympics showing to capture a gold medal in Poland

05 Monday Mar 2018

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2018 Winter Olympics Update – For those who are fretting over U.S. short track speedskater Maame Biney’s disappointing showing in PyeongChang, South Korea, you can stop now.

The 18-year-old phenom from suburban Washington, D.C., the first black woman to make the U.S. Olympic short track speedskating team, won a gold medal in the 500-meter sSaturday at the World Junior Short Track Championships in Tomaszow Mazowieckei, Poland.

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“This is a huge boost from the Olympics since I didn’t do as well as I wanted to,” Biney said. “This means that I’m really ready for the World Cup stage and can continue to get better.”

With a time of 44:305 seconds, the Ghanaian-born Biney became only the third U.S. woman to ever medal at a junior event. Her gold medal Saturday is the first junior gold medal for Team USA since J.R. Celski won the men’s 500m in 2009.

“It feels really good,” Biney said of Saturday’s victory. “I felt like I really deserved it today and I’m really happy. I just raced my race and made sure not to overestimate anyone.”

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Biney’s gold medal will go with a bronze medal that she won at the 2016-17 world junior championships.

She had a disappointing performance at the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, finishing fourth in a four-person quarterfinal 500-meter heat with a time of 44.77 seconds.

Maame Biney, front row left, and members of the U.S. Olympic short track speedskating team in PyeongChang (Photo/US Speedskating).

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” a tearful Biney said at the time. “I just have to wait four more year to be able to get back into this big stage. I can’t wait till those four years.”

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Erin Jackson becomes first black female U.S.Olympic long track speedskater

06 Saturday Jan 2018

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Another U.S. speedskating Olympic trial, another African-American woman on the team that’s headed to the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, next month.

Erin Jackson, a 25-year-old from Ocala, Florida, Friday became the first African American woman to qualify for the U.S. Olympic speedskating team in the long track competition.

Erin Jackson skated into the history books Friday when she became the first African-American woman to qualify for the Winter Olympics in long track speedskating (Photo/US Speedskating/John Kleba).

She accomplished the feat at the trials in Milwaukee nearly three weeks after 17-year-old Maame Biney became the first African-American woman to make  the U.S. team in short track competition.

What makes Jackson’s road to PyeongChang, South Korea, especially stunning is that she’s only been doing long track ice skating for four months.

“I surprised myself a lot. I really wasn’t expecting any of this,” Jackson said after making the team. “Just coming in as a newbie trying to do the best that I can.”

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Like several other speedskaters, Jackson made the transition to ice from inline skating, where she won a bunch of medals in international competition from 2008 to 2015. She’s a three-time roller sport athlete of the year.

“I’ve been an inline speedskater for 15 years,” Jackson said. “I came to Salt Lake City (Olympic oval) for the first time in March, well the end of February into March. Then I went back to inline for the summer and came back to Salt Lake in September, so it’s been about four months combined.”

Jackson is also a roller derby veteran. She began in the bruising sport in 2012 and was a member of the New Jax City Rollers, part of Jacksonville Roller Derby, an all-female flat-track roller derby league in Florida.

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Now she’s teammates with Biney and the legendary Shani Davis,  the 35-year-old Chicagoan who’ll be competing in his fifth consecutive Winter Olympics next month.

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Maame Biney becomes first black female U.S. Olympic speedskater

17 Sunday Dec 2017

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We interrupt this hockey blog to give a Color of Hockey big shout-out to Maame Biney, who became the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic speedskating team.

The 17-year-old short track skater from Reston, Virginia, punched her ticket to PyeongChang, South Korea, in February with a dominating performance at the U.S. Olympic trials over the weekend in Kerns, Utah.

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She swept the women’s 500-meter finals with a 43.291 finishing time in her first final and a personal-best 43.161 in the second 500-meter final.

“When I crossed the finish line, I wasn’t sure what I was thinking,” Biney said. “At first I was like, “‘Hey, cool, I won.’ When I realized I made the Olympic team, I started cheering like crazy.”

Her father was apparently pumped, too. He held up a sign before her second final that read “Kick Some Hiney Biney.”

Biney is no stranger to international competition. She won a bronze medal in the 2016-17 Short Track World Junior Championship and was a member of the 2015-16 U.S. world junior short track team.

While she’s the first African-American woman to make the U.S. Olympic speedskating team, African-American women have an illustrious history of participation in other Winter Games sports.
Vonetta Flowers was the first African-American athlete to win an Olympic gold medal when her two-person bobsled finished first at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Debi Thomas captured a bronze medal at the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in figure skating. The 2014 women’s Olympic bobsled team that competed in Sochi, Russia, featured five black women. The 2018 team could be mostly minority as well.
Biney began speedskating at age  6 after she was told she was too fast for figure skating. She’s an alum of the Fort Dupont Kids on Ice Speedskating, a Washington, D.C. program that was conducted at one of the few ice skating rinks in the United States located in a largely African-American neighborhood.

According to her Team USA bio, she wants to be a chemical engineer. She said that if she could have any super-power it would be the ability to freeze time.
Apparently, she already has the ability to crush it.
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