Profile · New Berlin, Wisconsin
Julie Marie Goskowicz Koons
Short-track speed skater; 2002 Salt Lake City Olympian (3,000m relay); New Berlin family with brother Tony (Eisenhower / 1994 Olympian)
$1 million
Julie Marie Goskowicz Koons raced short-track speed skating for the United States at the highest level, including a Winter Olympics berth and World Championship bronze while still a teenager. She nearly made the 1994 Olympic team at thirteen, qualified as a relay alternate for Nagano in 1998, and raced the women’s 3,000-meter relay at Salt Lake City in 2002, where the U.S. finished seventh. In 1996 she took World Championship bronze in the relay and the team event; she also earned bronze at the 1997 World Junior Championships. Her Olympic affiliation was Midway Speedskating Club in Saint Paul, the training base many Wisconsin short-track athletes have long needed once local timing runs out. Olympedia lists her birth as March 2, 1980, in Aurora, Illinois, while Wikipedia and New Berlin’s notable-people list call her New Berlin-born—the familiar hospital-versus-hometown split. Her brother Tony, a New Berlin Eisenhower graduate, was the 1995 World Junior 500-meter champion and a 1994 Lillehammer teammate who did not get into a race. Two Olympic berths from one Waukesha County household is the suburb’s rare short-track story. She later completed a part-time MBA, highlighted in a 2006 student-spotlight profile. New Berlin claims the family on its notable list; Saint Paul was where the Olympic clock ran.