From skate kid… with an Olympic dream… to Olympic gold.
From skate kid…
Bart Swings was born and raised in Herent, Leuven. The seed for his sports career was planted by Saint Nicholas, who brought a pair of inline skates as a present when he was 8 years old. Since then he developed a great passion for inline skating and soon, as a young kid, he was among the world's top inline skaters.
Currently, Bart has won seventeen medals at the Inline Speed Skating World Championships. In 2025 the World Games in Chengdu are scheduled, where he plans to participate as well.
with an Olympic dream…
His biggest dream in sports was to achieve Olympic gold. Since inline skating is not an Olympic sport, Bart made the switch to speed skating on ice in 2010. He was seriously driven by his Olympic dream and the switch from inline skating to speed skating was quite natural, although there was some technical difference between the two sports.
For example, in inline skating Bart felt perfectly how to make speed, but in ice skating he had to master a new technique for this. This has caused him to approach ice skating very analytically.
to Olympic gold.
Four years after the switch, Bart made his Olympic dream come true. He qualified for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and competed in four disciplines. He did not win a medal, but it was an encouraging first Olympic participation. The next Winter Olympics, in PyeongChang in 2018, Bart got a silver medal in the men's mass start. And after silver comes… gold. Bart made it happen in 2022 in Beijing: the first gold medal for Belgium at the Winter Olympics since 1948.
In other words: Bart puts our little country on the map of winter sports. His home base, Herent, is - next to a lot of other Belgian sport lovers - very proud of this. That’s why he became an honorary citizen there and also the local sports gym was named after him.