SPLENDID TURN OF FORTUNE
Skater almost quit after being left out of Sochi
Eight years after finishing fourth in the Vancouver Olympics and four years after not being chosen for the Sochi Games and pondering her figure skating career, the USA’s Mirai Nagasu is back at the Winter Olympics, this time with the triple axel, the difficult 3½-revolution jump that very few women around the world have ever mastered.
Mirai Nagasu had already lived at least two lifetimes in the sport of figure skating when she showed up in Colorado Springs in March 2014 to visit a friend and try to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
After winning her only national title at 14 in 2008 and finishing a surprising fourth at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, Nagasu’s fortunes turned, drastically so. A couple of uneven years followed, then she came back to finish third at the 2014 U.S. nationals before the Sochi Olympics, only to be dropped from the U.S. team by a committee in favor of fourth-place finisher Ashley Wagner.
Nagasu was devastated. “It was awful,” she said. “I was very close to quitting.” She trudged to the rink every day in Southern California to train in case she was needed as the first alternate. She was not.
Looking for a change of scenery, she decided to go to Colorado to visit Agnes Zawadzki, a friend and fellow competitor. Soon, Nagasu was on the ice with Olympic coach Tom Zakrajsek, asking if he would coach her. It turned out that the answer to what Nagasu wanted to do with the rest of her life, at least for the time being, couldn’t have been simpler. She kept on skating.
“The new environment really helped,” Nagasu said. “I just took a good old leap of faith.”
Zakrajsek was aware of Nagasu’s quick rise to the top of her sport and the struggles that followed. Nagasu was turning 21 that spring, an age by which young women have often left the sport.
“You have to promise me something,” Zakrajsek said to her. “You’re going to do something you’ve never done before. Let’s do something greater.”
“That’s why I’m coming back,” she replied. That something would be the triple axel, the difficult 3½-revolution jump that very few women around the world have ever mastered.
At their very first lesson together, Zakrajsek told her, “You can do this.” “I can,” Nagasu said, “and I want to.” Flash-forward to the 2018 U.S. national championships in San Jose. Nagasu, now 24, had put the triple axel into her repertoire of jumps for her short and long program in an attempt to make her second Olympic team a full eight years after her first.
The triple axel became her calling card. She was the talk of the competition, landing the jump time and again in practice that week, the only woman at- tempting it, and one of only three U.S. women to ever land it in competition.
Then came the six-minute warm-up for the short program. Nagasu felt her nerves kick in as the jump went haywire. But she stuck with it, and when it came time to land it in her program, she went for it, stumbling badly, but still received credit for it.
The old Mirai might have crumbled. This Mirai plowed ahead, rising to the occasion with a clean skate the rest of the way. Two nights later, her adrenaline rushing, Nagasu actually “overshot” the jump, landing a bit awkwardly on two feet, but used it to power through to a second-place finish behind new national champion Bradie Tennell. This time, the committee did not drop her, and she was headed to Pyeongchang.
“Talking about what happened in 2014 still makes me really emotional,” she said. “It’s not something I want to live again but it has led me to this moment. In Vancouver in 2010, everything happened so fast. In 2014 I missed that chance, and now it just means everything to me. I’m so proud that I’m here again, on the Olympic team.”
Nagasu had done the unthinkable in a sport ruled by teenage jumping beans: She became the first U.S. female figure skater to return to the Olympic Games after missing one.
“This is the Olympic season. This is the season to go for everything. During the summer, I was going for it on the harness (a device that allows skaters to jump while tethered and monitored by a coach) and taking hard falls on it. That willingness to put it out there has helped me get over the fear and want to push the boundaries and exceed my limits. When I’m old and decrepit, I want to know that I did everything I could to achieve my goals.”
In a career full of choices and decisions, it might have been the easiest she has ever had to make.