It was a long journey from Tenleytown to Milan-Cortina, but Conor McDermott-Mostowy ’17 finally made it to the Olympics.
McDermott-Mostowy was the only openly gay man representing Team USA this year and the first openly gay man ever to compete in Olympic speed skating. This week, McDermott-Mostowy returned to GDS and spoke at the high school and middle school Pride assemblies.
In his Feb. 11 Speed Skating Men’s 1000 meter race, McDermott-Mostowy finished ninth of 32 competitors—second of the three Americans—with only 2.2 seconds between him and his teammate Jordan Stolz, who won gold.
McDermott-Mostowy learned to skate when he was two years old but was never interested in hockey or figure skating. When McDermott-Mostowy was ten years old, however, he fell in love with speed skating.
“I was skating on the C&O Canal over there, near the old GDS campus, and I saw someone with speed skates and thought, ‘Those skates are so cool—I want to try whatever that is,’” McDermott-Mostowy said in an interview with the Bit. “We found a local team at Fort Dupont Ice Arena, and here I am 16 years later.”
But those 16 years weren’t all filled with the glory and success you’d expect of a future Olympic athlete, who, as McDermott-Mostowy pointed out at the high school Pride assembly, had a better chance at being struck by lightning than competing on the world stage. Rather, during those years, McDermott-Mostowy often lost.
In tournaments, he sometimes didn’t make it past the qualifying round, and in the ISU Junior World Championships Short Track team trials, McDermott-Mostowy lost in the final race and missed qualifying by one spot.
In 2017, McDermott-Mostowy said, he reached a mental tipping point. He kept losing in his competitions, frequently missed school and social events—he said he maybe went to one party during his high school years—and had to decide whether he was going to quit speed skating. He said, at that point, he “fell out of love with skating.”
And on top of all that, McDermott-Mostowy was coming to terms with his sexuality. “In many ways, having to come to terms with being gay made me a better athlete,” McDermott-Mostowy said, “but being an athlete made it much harder to come to terms with being gay.”
But McDermott-Mostowy was ready to give it one last shot in the 2017 ISU World Junior World Championships. To try something new and have some fun—and because he’d hit a mental road block in his short track races—McDermott-Mostowy tried out for the 5000 m long track event. He had tried long track for the first time only a few weeks prior but placed third in the team trials, making the team.
After the momentous win, McDermott-Mostowy kept skating and eventually tried out for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. He was feeling great going into the qualifiers, but right before the trials, McDermott-Mostowy contracted norovirus and, again, missed qualifying by one spot.
“I think you understand I am no stranger to losing,” McDermott-Mostowy said, laughing, at the assembly.
After falling short at the Olympic trials, McDermott-Mostowy realized he needed some hobbies. “It was out of necessity that I needed to find something else [to do],” he said. “I realized that if I neglected one aspect of my identity for another, I would feel empty regardless.”
McDermott-Mostowy took up climbing and participated in the AIDS/LifeCycle race from San Francisco to Los Angeles. “Skating was not my whole life anymore,” he said. “Whatever was happening at the rink, I felt like I could leave it at the rink.”
That newfound sense of freedom propelled McDermott-Mostowy into the best speed-skating season of his life this year. In the Olympic trials, McDermott-Mostowy beat Jordan Stolz, the same person who had bested McDermott-Mostowy by one spot in the 2022 Olympic trials.
McDermott-Mostowy has won 27 international competitions. Yet even on that successful path, he has also learned to lose—and has become the better for it. “A loss is only a failure if you learn nothing from it,” he said in an interview with the Bit. Later, at the high school assembly, he added, “I’ve lost so many more times than I’ve won, but that’s part of improving.”
“It shows that GDS students can excel and do anything they desire,” freshman Bianca Catalano said. “If someone just like us, someone who sat in this Forum, can make it onto TV, so can we.”