Rochette comforts shaky Daleman
Idol helps tearful Canadian put things into perspective after nightmarish free skate
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— This is what disaster looks like, when the world drops a house on your head.
Oh, not the real thing of course. Not an act of God, not a natural disaster, not genuine carnage.
Just a girl, standing alone in the middle of the ice, her face crumpling, even as she gives a stern tug on her ponytail, as if trying to buy time. When what she’d really love is to turn back time by just four minutes.
Never in her worst nightmares had Gabrielle Daleman imagined this. The once and again Canadian champion, reigning world bronze medallist, had an absolute shambles of a free skate program Friday morning, error-strewn from start to finish: three falls, two over-rotations, a doubled-down triple, an agonizingly slow camel spin.
And this program, “Rhapsody in Blue,” is her ace in the hole, resurrected late in the season to replace “Gladiator,” which just hadn’t sat well.
How bad was it? In the mixed zone, U.S. skater Mirai Nagasu — she’d popped her bid at repeating the triple Axel landed perfectly in the short program segment — referenced Daleman as an example of how bad stuff just happens sometimes. (Although Nagasu is a bit out there, claiming she’d used her free skate, in her head at least, as an audition for Dancing With the Stars.)
For Daleman, the 20-year-old from Newmarket, there was no lonelier place in the world than the Gangneung Ice Arena for those four agonizing minutes. Seeking redemption after a disappointing seventh in the short, the poor thing came completely undone, tears leaking down her cheeks as she gutted out the program, even as it went from bad to worse, tumbling to 15th overall.
“I’ll be honest,” said Daleman, when she finally emerged to face reporters. “I spent the past 20 minutes crying.”
A sympathy call from Joannie Rochette, backstage, had only barely eased the sting.
“She just said, she can’t explain what happens. It’s happened to her. But that I was really strong at nationals and really strong at the team event and that’s what I’m going to remember from these Olympics.
“She’s the reason I got into skating, so to hear that from her meant a lot.”
Still going home with a team event gold. But heavens.
“On warm-up I was fine. But about two minutes before my program started, I started feeling nauseous. I tried to get in my zone, get in my bubble. But it’s sports. We all have good days and we all have bad days. Today wasn’t my day.”
She took some solace from grinding it out. “I kept fighting for everything. I could have just singled everything and let it go, but I didn’t.”
Acatastrophe like that, what a skater wants most is to get the hell off the ice. Just bag it and scram. But they can’t, of course. They’re supposed to continue smiling amongst the ruins until the music stops.
“It’s kind of hard, dragging my dad and my brother all the way from Canada to see this, when it’s not me. I feel bad for all these people, that I didn’t skate properly for them, and the same with Canada. I feel bad, like I disappointed everyone.”
You want to say: nonsense. But there’s no comforting the miserable.
“Crap happens,” said Daleman as the tears spilled over anew. “It’s not very fair, but crap happens.”