OCALA, Fla. – Here in this old horse town, down the road from Darrell’s Dog Gone Good Diner, in the lot behind the Save A Lot food stores, through the flimsy wooden door, past the snack bar and Ms. Pac Man arcade game, there stands a grandmother with a booming voice and graying, stringy hair.

This woman holds the key to Winter Olympics glory.

Next month, Renee Hildebrand will send three athletes to the Games in South Korea: Joey Mantia, Brittany Bowe and Erin Jackson. They are all speedskaters, all from here, a town with no ice rink.

Jackson has trained on ice for only a total of four months of her life. She is now the first African-American woman ever to make the U.S. long-track team.

“I was more than surprised,” she says of her qualification. “It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t understand it.”

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Nobody really understands it. At Olympics trials, someone came up to Hildebrand and effused: “You’re the best developmental ice coach in the country!” Hildebrand said thanks but added, “I don’t coach ice.”

Meet the woman who built a winter mecca out of a roller rink behind a Save A Lot in Central Florida. Meet the Oracle of Ocala.

Hildebrand grew up in Lakeland, about 45 minutes south of here, and she always wanted to be a world champion roller skater. She got her start on the four-wheel, two-by-two skates and studied sports medicine so she could coach as well. In the early ’90s, she moved to Ocala for a job as a physical therapist, and at around that time, inline skates came out. It was as if the entire roller world hit a reset button. The tiers of the sport were slashed to the ground and someone like Hildebrand could leap to the top of the game if she could master inlines.

“It put me on a level playing field,” she says. “We all had to coach inlines.”

View photos Skate Away South in Ocala, Florida, is where Renee Hildebrand has helped mold three pupils into Olympic speedskaters. (Yahoo Sports) More

Since inlines mirrored speedskating on ice, she studied a book by Olympic gold medalist Dianne Holum. She absorbed the importance of technique and body positioning, and she became proficient in tutoring both.

The goal was always to win Olympics gold in inline. She still has a roller skating bumper sticker from 1980 that says, “Next stop, the Olympics.” But there was a problem: The sport never made it into the Games.

So although she got very good at coaching inline and even roller derby, the ultimate dream was not available. Unless …

In 2002, Derek Parra, a former inline skater who spent time in Tampa, won gold in speedskating at the Salt Lake Games. Others followed, including Chad Hedrick, who won gold four years later.

The kids Renee trained, Mantia and Bowe, made the switch as teens. Joey moved from Florida to Colorado and then Utah to train, and within three years he was beating teammate Shani Davis and world champion Denis Yuskov. It was almost the exact same trajectory for Bowe, who had played college hoops at Florida Atlantic before moving to Salt Lake. Less than four years after switching to ice, they were Olympians.

But the most amazing story was yet to come.

And it began in a Waffle House.

Erin Jackson’s mom, Rita, loved the Southern staple, and she would always order the Texas Toast. When you spend that much time at Waffle House, sometimes you get to know the regulars. One of the regulars was a local inline coach known as “Nasty Nay.”

Hildebrand assumed the name for her demeanor but because every derby skater has a handle. In real life she loved coaching and when inline skating invariably came up in conversation, Erin’s mom mentioned her 10-year-old daughter. Hildebrand started working with the little girl, and after some time she had a Derby name of her own: “Miss Jax’em.”

There wasn’t much in Erin’s background that screamed “elite athlete.” Her dad, Tracy, built fire trucks. Rita was a pharmacy tech. Even Erin herself was more interested in schoolwork; she would go to the University of Florida and major in materials engineering.

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