If you’re even a small fan of the Olympics or sports in general, this is a cool story. And if you happened to catch the men’s team pursuit speed skating final in Milan earlier this week, you already know what I’m about to describe. But even if you didn’t, stick with me, because what happened on that ice is one of the best illustrations of innovation, competition, and the price of being first that I’ve come across in a long time.
The Oval
For the uninitiated, team pursuit speed skating is simple in concept, yet devilishly complex in execution. Two teams of three skaters line up on opposite sides of a 400-meter oval. A starting gun fires. Each team skates in a tight single-file line for eight laps (about two miles), and the clock stops when the third skater crosses the finish line. That last detail is critical. You’re only as fast as your slowest member, which means the entire event is an exercise in team efficiency.
At top speed, these athletes are moving at roughly 35 miles per hour, hunched into an aerodynamic tuck that has to be as painful on the lower back as it looks. And at those speeds, air resistance is the enemy. It’s the same principle that governs why NASCAR drivers draft inches from each other’s bumpers while driving ~200 mph (if you missed the end of last weekend’s Daytona 500, I highly recommend it). The skater at the front of the line is doing the brutal work, punching a hole through the air so the two teammates behind can sit in the slipstream and conserve energy.
For nearly two decades since the event debuted at the 2006 Torino Olympics, the tactical playbook was universal. Every team in the world used the same method: rotation. The lead skater would take a turn at the front for a lap or so, then peel off to the side in the corner and drift to the back of the line, allowing a fresh teammate to take over the wind-breaking duties. It was essentially a relay of suffering, each skater taking turns absorbing the drag before recovering in the draft. The Dutch, the traditional powerhouse of anything involving ice and blades, perfected this approach and dominated accordingly.
The American Experiment
After a dismal eighth-place finish at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics, the U.S. team had a choice: keep doing what everyone else was doing and hope to out-skate them, or fundamentally rethink the problem. They chose the latter.
Shane Domer, the Chief of Sport Performance for U.S. Speedskating, started asking an uncomfortable question: what if the rotations themselves were the problem? Every time a skater peeled off and drifted to the back, the aerodynamic “train” broke apart. The new leader had to suddenly absorb the full brunt of the wind. The skater who had fallen back had to accelerate to catch up. It was messy. It was inefficient. And in a sport decided by hundredths of a second, those transition moments were bleeding time.
Domer brought in an aerodynamics expert, Ingmar Jungnickel, who had previously optimized cycling team formations for the Tour de France. Jungnickel ran the numbers and proposed something radical: stop rotating entirely. Instead, lock the three skaters into a fixed order for all eight laps, and have the second and third skaters physically push the skater in front of them, hands on hips, transferring energy forward like a human locomotive.
It was dubbed “Project Push,” and from the outside, it looked a little absurd. Three grown men, hunched over, glued together, barreling around an oval like a six-legged creature. But the numbers didn’t lie. By eliminating transition losses and keeping the aerodynamic envelope perfectly intact, the push method was measurably faster. When executed correctly, the trio looked like a single skater from the front, their feet lifting off the ice in unison, their bodies forming a seamless shape that cut through the air.
Dominance, Then Disruption
The results were staggering. The American trio of Casey Dawson, Ethan Cepuran, and Emery Lehman, known as the “Pain Train,” won five consecutive World Cup titles between 2021 and 2025. They shattered the world record multiple times, ultimately setting it at 3:32.49 in November 2025, a time that beat the reigning Olympic champion, Norway, by nearly three seconds.
Heading into the Milan Olympics this month, they were the overwhelming favorites. Undefeated on the World Cup circuit. Riding a six-race winning streak. The gold medal, everyone assumed, was a formality.
But here’s the thing about innovation. The moment you reveal it, the clock starts ticking on your advantage. The U.S. team first debuted the push method publicly around 2020. That gave the rest of the world four full years to study it, deconstruct it, and build their own version. And that’s exactly what Italy did.
In the gold medal race, the Americans skated a brilliant first half, leading by over half a second after four laps. They were right where they needed to be. But midway through the fifth lap, the synchronization fractured. The push method is high-risk, high-reward. Because the skaters are physically connected, any loss of rhythm is catastrophic. When one skater “blows up,” as Cepuran described it after the race, referring to hitting the physiological wall, the drag increases exponentially for everyone. In the final three laps, the U.S. lost over four seconds to the Italians, who had adopted the Americans’ own innovation and, on that night, executed it better. Italy won the gold. The U.S. took silver.
From the Oval to the Office
As much as I genuinely enjoyed watching this story unfold, the parallels to the business and investment world are hard to ignore.
The American speed skating program did what the best companies do: they identified a structural inefficiency that everyone else had accepted as “just the way it’s done,” and they engineered a better solution. Apple did this with the smartphone. Netflix did it with content distribution. Amazon did it with logistics. In each case, the innovator didn’t just work harder within the existing framework; they changed the framework itself.
But innovation, whether on the ice or in the marketplace, comes with a built-in paradox. The very act of succeeding publicly invites imitation. The U.S. team’s performance chief admitted they “unveiled it too early,” giving competitors years to replicate the technique. This is a dynamic every market leader faces. Tesla pioneered the desirable electric car, and now legacy automakers (and other startups) have brought immense competition to the segment. Apple created the modern smartphone, and Samsung built a global empire on a refined version of the same idea.
The key insight isn’t that imitation erases the innovator’s advantage. It’s that the act of innovation creates the value. Yes, Italy won the gold in Milan. But they won it using a method that was invented by someone else. The U.S. team didn’t just move their own program forward; they moved the entire sport forward. The world record that seemed untouchable five years ago is now the baseline. That’s what real ingenuity does. It raises the floor for everyone.
Why This Gives Me Confidence
As we sit here in early 2026, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the noise. Tariff threats. Geopolitical tension. Inflation concerns. Market volatility. The daily headlines are designed to make you feel like the world is perpetually on the edge of a cliff.
But stories like the “Pain Train” remind me of something that doesn’t make headlines. The relentless engine of human ingenuity keeps moving forward. Somewhere right now, an engineer is solving a problem that no one else has thought to question. A team in a lab is running computations on a process that everyone else assumed was already optimized. A small company is building the “push method” of its industry, ready to upend the existing playbook.
This is, fundamentally, why long-term investing works. The short-term noise is real, and it can be uncomfortable. But the long-term trajectory of human innovation is an incredibly powerful force that compounds over time in ways nearly impossible to predict in advance. No one in 2018 would have guessed that the solution to American speed skating’s mediocrity was to have three guys push each other around an oval. But someone asked the question, did the math, and changed the sport forever.
The lesson from that ice in Milan is simple. Don’t bet against ingenuity. The next breakthrough is always closer than it appears, and the companies and economies that foster it tend to win over the long run, even if they occasionally take silver along the way.
Markets / Economy
- Markets continue to be choppy to start the year, with concerns about Iran, inflation, and tariffs making headlines. The S&P finished the week up 1.1%, the Nasdaq up 1.5%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 up 0.6%.
- Core PCE rose by 0.4% from the previous month in December. The rise surpassed market expectations of a softer 0.3% increase, reflecting the sharpest increase since February and aligning with the FOMC’s warning that the disinflation process is slower than previously expected.
- The U.S. economy expanded at an annualized rate of 1.4% in Q4 2025, following a 4.4% growth rate in Q3 and well below forecasts of 3%, the advance estimate showed.
- The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump’s global tariffs are illegal, in a major setback for one of the administration’s key agenda items.
Stocks
- U.S. equities were in positive territory. Communication Services and Industrials were the top performers, while Consumer Staples and Materials lagged. Growth stocks led value stocks, and large caps beat small caps.
- International equities closed higher for the week. Emerging markets fared better than developed markets.
Bonds
- The 10-year Treasury bond yield increased three basis points to 4.09% during the week.
- U.S. bond markets were in negative territory this week, while International bond markets were positive.
- High-yield bonds led for the week, followed by corporate bonds and government bonds.
