GOLD METTLE

U.S. hopeful must show Gracie under pressure

SOCHI, Russia — Gracie Gold was all balletic arms and stylish poses during a practice session on Tuesday morning — until it was time for the opening triple lutz in her short program at the Iceberg Skating Palace. Then, suddenly, she was down on her keister, looking up.

Nothing elegant about that. Better Tuesday than Wednesday, though, when this sort of rare bungle would cost her any shot at a medal.

“It’s just skating and you’re going to have a couple of mistakes,” Gold said afterward. “Even in practice, you're not hitting 100%. It’s a little like aerials. It’s pretty nerve-wracking.”

After 10 years of preparation, this will be a defining moment for the 18-year-old U.S. champion, America’s best hope at a medal in the women’s event. While nobody expects Gold to steal the title here, she has a legitimate shot at the podium. Yulia Lipnitskaya of Russia and Yuna Kim of Korea are the co-favorites. Gold is lumped right after them with contenders such as Carolina Kostner of Italy and Mao Asada and Akiko Suzuki of Japan.

“It’s hard to say who’s the underdog, who's the dark horse,” Gold said. “It really depends on who you talk to.”

The crowds . . . the interviews . . . the tweets from Taylor Swift. It’s all enough to upend many skaters, yet Gold seems very much in touch with her feelings in this regard. Her veteran coach, Frank Carroll, has been a great aid in the mental game, a significant buffer.

Gold also says that in many ways, the fans and cameras at the U.S. championships in Boston prepared her for this. In other ways, they didn’t.

“This is a different kind of nerves,” she said. “A bigger scale. You’re more in awe and less jittery.”

Every competitor internalizes that pressure in different ways.

“I feel it in the knees, my heart starts pounding a little faster,” she said. “I get closed off and have to do something.”

Gold is a smart young woman, polished beyond her 18 years, who can at times come off as cool and practiced. This is a tough balancing act. Cool, blond and distant — the Grace Kelly factor — is good until it isn’t. As Ashley Wagner said after her own training session, “To put on a performance, you have to be emotional. You can’t be a zombie.”

Gold is getting there. She opened up considerably to a small group of reporters on Tuesday about goals at Sochi and beyond these Olympics. Her father, Carl, an anesthesiologist, and her mom, Denise, an ER nurse, are both here to watch and advise. For a while Gold entertained the notion of following them into the medical field. Her parents didn’t want that, however. After all the sacrifices she’d made for skating, they felt she should do something that required less training.

“T hey don’t recommend medical school,” she said. Instead, Gold is thinking now of a future with “just some freedom,” whether that involves culinary school or a major in journalism that might take her in a lot of directions.

“With that major, you don’t have to be a newspaper writer,” she told the newspaper writers interviewing her. “You can be riding in helicopters on The Weather Channel.”

She counts on one hand now the number of exams she needs to graduate high school from the University of Missouri online program. She hasn’t applied yet to any colleges, might defer that decision while she skates some more. At the same time, Gold sounds confident she can enroll almost anywhere she’d want. Sarah Hughes, at Yale, and Michelle Kwan, at Tufts, have proved there are considerable academic opportunities available for sharp skating stars.

“I’m also pretty good at school,” Gold said.

She will skate 22nd out of 30 skaters on Wednesday, several competitors after Yuna Kim but before most of the other top women. Gold was lucky enough not to draw the short straw and skate after Lipnitskaya, who will surely bring down the house. For the first night, that fate belongs to Kostner. Gold insists she is even ready for that, in the event she is grouped with the Russian teen in the long program on Thursday.

“It’s probably in my best interest not to be in the same warmups,” she said honestly. “But it’s nothing you can run away from.”

Gold’s aim in the short program is realistic: “If not the top three, then two or three points from it,” she said. “Keep me in the pack.”

Then, on Thursday, better than the pack.