Nam Nguyen,
Skater clicks with coach and ends career spiral after massive growth spurt
a compact sensation at age 12, has reinvented himself at 19 (and five-foot-11).
VANCOUVER— A media mook asks Nam Nguyen if he’s finally stopped growing already and for heaven’s sake.
“I’m done.” Accompanied by an eye roll. “No more growing.” Canadians might remember Nguyen as the mini-bundle of razzmatazz who stole the show at the Vancouver Olympics figure skating exhibition gala. He was12, but looked about 6.
Canadians who’ve been paying closer attention will also recall that Nguyen claimed the national men’s title in 2015, the season that Patrick Chan took off from competition, with a stunner fifth-place world debut afterwards. And the world junior title in 2014. And national juvenile, pre-novice and novice laurels before that. He is not recognizable. These days, when the reporter scrum gathers around the Markham native, most interrogators have to look up. Because Nguyen is fivefoot-11.
That’s normal-ish for a 19-year-old male. It’s kind of freakish for a figure skater. Too tall for the sport, really. Centre of gravity too high for the multiple rotations of a clean triple, much less quad.
The growth spurt — a whole foot — occurred right after his nationals triumph, happening so fast that it played havoc with Nguyen’s jumping technique, which in turn, over the subsequent couple of seasons, screwed up his mind and spirit. To the point, in fact, that he came this close to quitting the sport entirely. Changing coaches, changing training base, moving away from the Brian Orser group in Toronto, relocating in San Jose, returning to the Greater Toronto area under Tracey Wainman and Gregor Filipowski at the York Regional Skating Academy.
His body felt comfortable nowhere. His body felt alien to him.
And the thrill of skating was gone. It just never used to be so hard.
Then, after an eighth-place showing at NHK a year ago, Nguyen uprooted himself again. It was either, he decided, all in or all out. He delivered himself to coach Robert Burke in Richmond Hill, who also tutors Michelle Long. It clicked.
“From that day till now has been good,” Nguyen was saying after prac- tice on Thursday, a Yankees baseball cap squished over his head. “Working hard, building upon the skills and the jumps and the spins. I’m really excited to show what we’ve done this week.”
Canada will send only two men to the Olympics. That will likely be Chan and . . . somebody else, from a wannabe crew that includes Nguyen, Kevin Reynolds, Liam Firus, Keegan Messing and Nicolas Nadeau. So this weekend matters hugely.
“It wasn’t really working out with Tracy and Gregor,” the 19-year-old son of Vietnamese immigrants explains, referring to yet another spin on his personal coaching carousel. “We’re still fine with each other. But skating-wise, I just felt I was going nowhere. It was really hard to find motivation in that place. I wanted to train with somebody who has the same drive as me and was able to actually kick my butt.”
Presumably, his posterior got a good booting from Burke. More crucially, Nguyen found his rhythm again, along with his quads. Two of those, toe and Salchow, are included in his free skate. But he’s also working on a quad and a quad loop. That lanky physique has found its axis again.
“I discovered the joy of the sport again. Robert has helped me tremendously with that. There’d been days where I hated this sport so much,” he admits. “The inconsistency. I was growing so much and things were . . . going away. And I’m super-impatient about it. Just extremely frustrating. It all accumulated to a point where I was, like, I hate this. I hate everybody. I hate everything. I didn’t want to be here anymore.”
He’s done with hating. He’s done with 24/7 intensity. He’s OK with goofing around on the practice ice, when in the mood. “Like today, being a little jack-butt out there, but all of it was fine.”
Because Nguyen knows, intuitively, he still has the complete package to succeed Chan as an international force in figure skating. It’s coming back to him. He can even peek beyond the horizon of the Pyeongchang Olympics to Beijing four years later.
“That’s definitely a possibility. Based on what I feel right now, my self-confidence, the assets that I have, I feel like I can continue to build on this next year and all the way to Beijing.’’ On the other hand . . . “That’s far ahead for me to look at. I don’t even know what I’m going to be eating for dinner tonight.”