I’m at an ice skating rink – Ice in Paradise, in Goleta. And fearlessly speeding round the outside is Danish Olympic silver medalist Viktor Thorup.
"Oh, we go fast. In the final sprint, we hit 40 miles an hour. You don't want to think too much about the fact that you're on a millimeter-thick knife, basically, because that's terrifying," Thorup told KCLU.
Thorup won a silver medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics, the first Dane to earn a medal in an individual event, and took home what was only the second medal ever for Denmark.
"I won the silver medal at these recent Olympics, 2026, in speed skating. This is the first and only individual winter Olympic medal that any person has ever won for Denmark," said Thorup.
"So that overnight, from finishing that race, you get a call from the king, from the president, you come back in Denmark, you step out of the airplane, and everybody knows your name! You go to the bakery in the morning like, 'Hey, Victor, that's crazy. What do you need?' So, to go from overnight to becoming a sports superstar of your country. It is never why I got into sport, but I think it's a really fun thing that I wish everybody got to experience. It was the best day of my life, the most significant day of my whole career," he said.
The 32-year-old started in-line skating aged six, and acknowledges that the medal took a "lifetime of training and wanting it."
He’s here in Goleta promoting a product to help open nasal passages for breathing. It’s called Intake Breathing, and he says the product is part of a routine that took him from a very good speed skater to the Olympic podium.
"The difference between first and second [place] at the Olympics is nothing. We're all incredibly good skaters and every athlete at the Olympics is very well trained," he said.
"In 2014, I didn't qualify for the Olympics. I was the best skater in the world to not qualify. The top 20 in the world go to the Olympics; I was 21st. In a 5,000-meter event, I missed that time by one second," he said.
"So I simply just started going through all these things, started with the lowest-hanging fruit, obviously, nutrition and sleep. And then I started looking into the breathing. I counted, because I wrote all these things down, and Intake Breathing was the 11th thing that I tested. And it was the first time I actually could track things. I had an hour more of deep sleep. I had a lower resting heart rate. HRV went way higher, which in any sport where you need any type of coordination, that's crucial," he said.
"I think putting those two together, and we still got three and a half years to hit that peak. So yeah, I'm for sure in it for the gold in a little less than four years," he said.
There’s a part of Santa Barbara County which has close links to his home country of Denmark, of course, so will he visit Solvang?
"I want to go there. I just hope I'm not going to be disappointed, like, 'oh, that's not how my grandma made it'. So if I can go there and get a freshly baked rye bread, that would be gold," he said.
So he's handing out medals for bread and looking forward to trying for another one himself in the next Winter Olympics, in France in 2030.
