From ‘blind leap’ to quadruple lutz
Road filled with sacrifices, challenges may end at Olympics for Palo Alto teen
SAN JOSE » Fei Ge tried. She did everything she could to persuade her son Vincent Zhou to find a sport that would keep the family together in Palo Alto.
“Mom, I want to skate,” 8-year-old Vincent insisted.
Nine years ago, Ge quit her computer science job and moved her son to Riverside so he could train under one of the country’s best coaches.
They rented a halffinished
condo that the mother discovered didn’t have working lights or heat. She and her boy took showers in the student dormitories at nearby UC-Riverside.
Ge figured her son would learn how to do a double Axel and some triple jumps, then move on after a year so they could reunite with her husband and daughter in Palo Alto.
“I never realized this is the road you never return,” she said.
Zhou, 17, emerged as one of America’s best male skaters in 2017 by finishing second at the U.S. championships and winning the Junior World Championships after becoming the first junior in history to land a quadruple lutz. He’s one of five serious contenders competing for three Olympic berths at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships that begin for the senior men Thursday at SAP Center.
Zhou’s road to figure skating success is typical of many elite athletes who gravitate to the coaches with the best reputations.
For many singles skaters that means relocating to Southern California or Colorado Springs, Colorado. For ice dancers, it’s Novi, Michigan. While the Bay Area has produced some promising talent, the rinks in Oakland, San Jose and San Francisco cater to ice hockey leagues, local skating officials said.
“Honestly, the big-name coaches are not in this area if you want to chase a dream,” Ge said. “You pretty much have to go somewhere else.”
In 2009, they settled on Tammy Gambill in Riverside in the facility where Fremont’s Karen Chen and other elite skaters train.
They worked with Gambill eight times before moving. Ge kept hoping her son would change his mind and stick with soccer, the other sport he enjoyed.
The boy insisted on skating.
Ge didn’t give up. She took him to the Stanford Diving Club where his older sister competed. Vivian Zhou went on to star at Gunn High School and now competes for Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she studies brain and cognitive science.
Young Vincent, then a Hoover Elementary student, wouldn’t budge, so he and his mother moved into
the unfinished condo and commuted home on the weekends while putting a ton of miles on the car.
Now they don’t have time to return to the Peninsula on the weekends because Zhou trains under Christy Krall in Colorado Springs, where he also uses the U.S. Olympic Committee’s training center for off-ice preparations.
Ge and her husband, Max Zhou, a Google software engineer with a master’s degree from UC Berkeley, have done everything they can for their children. They sent their daughter to their native Beijing one summer to train in the world’s most dominant diving country.
“We were taking a blind leap into a hole,” Zhou said of the decision to train with Gambill. “It is unbelievable to think we made that huge sacrifice. Not many families can afford to live apart from each other, especially when I was just 8 and I hardly understood what even was going on.”
Zhou doubts he would have progressed to the international level without moving.
Like most skating parents, the Zhous didn’t have a grand scheme at the start. As immigrants who arrived in 1992, they wanted to expose their children to all sorts of activities.
They took Zhou to Winter Lodge in Palo Alto for skating parties. But the parents had an ulterior motive.
“In the home, he would give us a headache,” Ge recalled. “He was a tsunami.”
They told their son to go outside and play sports, hoping he would return home ready for bed.
But Zhou was reaching for the stars at an early age. He displayed mad acrobatic skills at 3 to get to his beloved Lego sets that were perched high on a bookshelf so he wouldn’t make a mess when his parents weren’t in the room.
Inevitably, the boy would be found with the Legos on the floor.
“Mommy is not going to criticize you, just tell me how you did it,” Ge asked her son.
Vincent had pulled a table near the bookshelf, put a chair on top of the table and then a toy box on top
of the chair and climbed up.
Now he’s trying to ascend Mt. Olympus.
Nathan Chen of Salt Lake City is considered the big American favorite after winning the gold medal at the recent Grand Prix final and also finishing second a year ago. But twotime Olympian Johnny Weir finds Zhou more artistic than Chen.
“He has a soft touch when it comes to the ice,” said Weir, an NBC Sports figure skating announcer. “His body lends itself to a more lyrical and classical elegance on the ice.”
Zhou finished second at the 2017 U.S. championships because, like Chen, he has big quadruple jumps that garner the most points. Zhou struggled on the Grand Prix circuit this season but arrives in San Jose in good shape to make it to the Pyeongchang Games. The formula is simple: If he lands his jumps, Zhou almost assuredly will earn one of the three spots.
But in mid-November it didn’t feel that way. The teenager let his emotions spill out in a raw handwritten
note after he finished ninth at the International de France Grand Prix where he fell on four quadruple jumps over two days. Zhou posted a two-page letter on social media for the world to see.
“I performed with all the passion and spirit I could muster,” Zhou wrote. “I made mistakes. I failed my expectations, and I am disappointed with the results. However, I am Vincent Zhou. I am young, ambitious, hungry, and motivated. But most importantly, I am still learning.
“I am learning how to balance my training. I am learning about the danger of ambition. I am learning what it takes to succeed. I am learning how to do what is best for my future.”
Said Tom Zakrajsek, one of Zhou’s three coaches: “It gives you a glimpse into the mindset of what it is like for a young person who is that good and has the ability to be on the Olympic team. It gives you an insight into the pressures that they face every time their names are announced and they go out to compete.”
Zhou’s coaches huddled with the skater after the disappointment in France where the teen said he lacked confidence while attempting six quadruple jumps. They cut back on almost everything.
“Afterward, we hit the reset button and right now I feel like a completely different skater,” Zhou said last week. “We didn’t obsess on what went wrong because that can lead to negativity and a lot of stress.”
He has changed his free skate with plans to land five quadruple jumps and two triple Axels.
But, really, the skater has focused on artistry and the presentation this past year as he entered the senior level.
“I’m not just a jump machine,” he said. “I don’t want to be that.”
Until he is a more balanced skater, Zhou considers himself a work in progress. It’s difficult to expect a teenager to transform his personality on the ice, but that’s what Zhou has been trying to do.
He recalled struggling to act in a school play at age 6.
“I wasn’t very good,” Zhou said.
Talk about harsh critics. Gambill laughed at her skater’s evaluation.
“When he was a tiny boy he was very much a showman and a crowd pleaser,” she said. “It’s in him to do it.”
Gambill could tell she had a special one when starting to work with Zhou. But over the years, the coach also has had to counter that unbridled push to succeed.
“Sometimes he will drive himself too hard with the jumps,” Gambill said.
In 2010, Zhou suffered from severe knee pain that he assumed was tendinitis. He skated with the condition for three years before finally getting it examined. It turns out the skater had been training with a torn meniscus in his right knee.
The tear was so severe surgeons removed the cartilage in 2013. Doesn’t matter. The teen’s ready for a big jump this week.
“He’s not to be denied,” Gambill said. “He’s got that inner heart.”