IT’S HARD TO FIGURE
A medal was unlikely, but no one expectedU. S. women skaters to bomb
GANGNEUNG, South Korea — If you were looking for thrills and spills at these Winter Olympics, you needed to look no further than the American women’s figure skating trio.
Mirai Nagasu, Karen Chen and Bradie Tennell threw up a collective wreck of a performance at Gangneung Ice Arena on Friday, one that was as historically bad statistically as it was on the eyes.
One by one they fell, stumbled or faltered their way to Olympic insignificance and that was just half of it. Their attempts to explain it away afterward fell harder than Tennell’s staggered triple Lutz, Chen’s tumble on a triple loop or Nagasu’s failure to achieve liftoff on her famed triple axel.
Ninth ( Tennell), 10th ( Nagasu) and 11th ( Chen) doesn’t sound so awful on paper. But this is the nation of Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill and Kristi Yamaguchi and where the worst previous collective effort was a sixth/ eighth/ 11th at the 1948 Games.
You’d kind of like an explanation, not that we are owed one, but just to feel like there’s some understanding of what went wrong with a view to fixing it down the road.
Instead, Chen cried for her mom and spoke of the difficulty in not being able to be with her constantly during the Olympics. She’s 18, for goodness sake, so let’s not be too harsh, but she is also an international- level competitor who placed fourth in the world last year. Russia’s new Olympic champion Alina Zagitova is 15, and you get the sense that while preparing for gold she wasn’t too worried about whether mama was enjoying her gimbap.
“The biggest change for me was not being able to see my mom 24/ 7,” Chen said. “For me that was something that I really missed. We tried to call and Facetime each other as much as possible. I actually did run upstairs to give her a hug and talk for a brief second before I came down to warm up but for sure I definitely missed her.”
All very sweet, but you’d sure like to see some steel.
There wasn’t considered to be much hope of a medal from this group of U. S. women skaters and if there was going to be a breakthrough it likely would have been from Nagasu, the 24- year- old who placed fourth in Vancouver in 2010 and who became the first American women to land an Olympic triple axel in the team event.
Instead, she will be remembered more for what she said afterward than what she did on the ice, where she failed to launch on her signature jump and saw her score tumble.
She couldn’t throw her feet in the air for the triple axel, instead stepping right out of it, but she did throw some fire into her media appearance. She started by claiming personal credit for winning the team a bronze medal early in the Olympics when really, things were essentially wrapped up by the time she skated. She wasn’t happy with the cold showers in the village — fair enough, no one likes a cold shower — then admitted that her priority for her final Olympic display was to audition herself for ‘‘ DancingWith the Stars.’’
“I would like to be on [ DWTS] because I am a star,” she said. “I didn’t back down, and though I got zero points for my triple axel, in my mind I went for it.”
Going for it on the ice might have been a more productive idea.
In a tweet later Friday, Nagasu blamed a rut in the ice for not hitting the triple axle in the free skate.
In terms of consistency, U. S. champion Bradie Tennell was at least expected to put in a clean, if unspectacular performance. She is a little robotic but appeared to be a nerveless jumper . . . until she wasn’t. She fell in the short program and landed on her behind, and was totally out of sorts in the free skate too, stumbling out of a combination and messing up a triple Lutz.
When asked how the U. S. could possibly hope to close the gap on Russia, whose brilliant duo of Zagitova and Evgenia Medvedeva went gold- silver, Tennell didn’t sound too optimistic. “Anything’s possible,” she said. Hmm, maybe. Four years, thankfully, is a long time.
But the quote that summed up the whole thing the best, predictably came from the ever- garrulous Nagasu.
“I am just ready to go home,” she said, and the Americans are, disappointed and empty- handed.