Serendipitous addition of Jeremy Abbott to Alysa Liu’s coaching team helping her work through growth spurt

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Serendipitous addition of Jeremy Abbott to Alysa Liu’s coaching team helping her work through growth spurt

Serendipity is part of this story. And both happenstance and coincidence also played a part in how Jeremy Abbott became a full-time member of Alysa Liu’s coaching team this fall.

Abbott describes the way it all developed as “organic,” a word he also uses to explain the process Team Liu is using to further her growth as a skater. It is a word that seems especially appropriate for Liu this season, when organic physical changes have challenged the two-time reigning U.S. women’s figure skating champion.

Four months past her 15th birthday, Liu is some three inches taller, with longer limbs and a different center of mass, than she was at this point a year ago. All that has made it harder for her to spin in the air as quickly as she could.

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Ten years later, Queen Yuna’s iconic crown glitters with transcendent brilliance

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Ten years later, Queen Yuna’s iconic crown glitters with transcendent brilliance

How could a 19-year-old woman achieve perfection while bearing an entire nation’s hopes and the baggage of its past, while 50 million South Koreans stood on her shoulders as she tried to stay upright while doing triple jumps on a slippery surface with knife-thin blades?

That is what Yuna Kim did 10 years ago on this date, lifting spirits in her homeland and elevating herself into a singular place in Olympic history by winning the women’s figure skating title at the 2010 Winter Games.

How? Even Kim still marvels over that, as she said in an email interview done this month through her management company. Even now, the moment confounds her, brings back the nervousness she had in Vancouver and, as it did then, makes her teary-eyed because she feels overwhelmed.

“I always wonder how I did it, and every time I watch, it doesn’t seem real,” she said.

She had not only won South Korea’s first Olympic figure skating gold medal but had beaten an exceptionally talented Japanese rival for it, a fact of no small consequence given the complicated history of relations between Japan and South Korea for five centuries. Sports competitions between the two countries had always been freighted with nationalistic implications.

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Evan Lysacek's golden performances seem surreal to him 10 years later

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Evan Lysacek's golden performances seem surreal to him 10 years later

Last month, when Evan Lysacek was speaking to students in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in his role as a sports envoy for the U.S. Department of State, the presentation included a showing of his figure skating short program and free skate from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Lysacek rarely skates these days. He last did something that could be called a public performance when Ice Theatre of New York honored him in October 2016. With an ankle ligament still sore from a misstep injury that threatened to have him in a cast for his wedding last Dec. 14, he shuffled briefly around the ice while working with skaters in Malaysia

That detachment from the sport has made it difficult for him to believe what he was seeing in the video of the greatest performances of his career.

“It’s surreal to watch,” Lysacek said. “When I think of what it took to get there, I think, ‘How did I ever do that?’”

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Virtue-Moir left sport quietly, but their dazzling career deserves this loud shout out

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Virtue-Moir left sport quietly, but their dazzling career deserves this loud shout out

The announcement was hardly unexpected, so much so that it created little buzz even on figure skating news groups.

After all, no one thought Canadians Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir would be extending their extraordinary competitive career after taking another post-Olympic leave from the sport with yet another Olympic ice dance medal (this one a second gold) on their résumé.

And retirement is what they in fact confirmed last week.

Yet there was part of me that hoped they would come back again, especially with this season’s world championships not only in their own country but also in the same city, Montreal, as their training base before the PyeongChang Olympics.

Whether they won another world medal or not in Montreal – and a recommitted Virtue and Moir were very likely to be on the podium, if not atop it – the couple would have been awash in deserved acclaim from the home crowd, as they were in winning their first Olympic title in Vancouver in 2010 with a free dance that left me spellbound then and does the same in every re-viewing.

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Lindsey Vonn, who sped past limits to top of ski racing (and sometimes flew into safety nets, as she did again in her penultimate race), is coming to a stop

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Lindsey Vonn, who sped past limits to top of ski racing (and sometimes flew into safety nets, as she did again in her penultimate race), is coming to a stop

I am not a skier.  So, when I began intermittently writing about the sport in the 1980s, I had no first-hand appreciation of the speeds top Alpine ski racers reached – and the danger that sped along with them.

Television didn’t help, because the head-on camera angle does not provide a frame of reference.  And you could tell me they were hitting 75 miles per hour, but I had no perspective on what that meant until the 1989 World Championships in Vail, Colo.

One day during women’s downhill training, I hiked partway up the side of the final pitch to the finish.  From that vantage point, with the skiers coming past me rather than coming at me, as they did when I stood in the media area at the finish, it was very clear how fast they were moving.  Frighteningly fast.

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