Bradie Tennell arrives again at the summit of U.S. women’s skating

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Bradie Tennell arrives again at the summit of U.S. women’s skating

Bradie Tennell knows the old cliché athletes use to explain what keeps them going through thick and thin, when they try not to have their eyes always on a prize.

“They say it’s about the journey, not the destination,” Tennell said. “But the destination feels pretty good, too.”

It was a place she had been before and one Tennell turned her life inside out last summer to reach again: the top step of the women’s podium at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

Tennell got there Friday night as convincingly as she had the first time, in 2018, sweeping the short program and free skate, earning 232.61 points and winning by a whopping 17.28 over the surprise (and surprised) runner-up, Amber Glenn, whose best previous finish at nationals was fifth last year.

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Bradie Tennell takes command in quest for an elusive second U.S. figure skating title

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Bradie Tennell takes command in quest for an elusive second U.S. figure skating title

After Bradie Tennell burst into prominence on the U.S. figure skating scene by winning her first national title in 2018, she did not imagine she still would be looking for a second one three seasons later.

Especially since Tennell had won the short program at the 2019 and 2020 U.S. Championships, only to falter in the free skates, finishing second and third as phenom Alysa Liu took the gold medals.

“Winning another has been a driving force for me,” Tennell said.

And yet she understood that it couldn’t turn into an obsession.

“It can be very overwhelming if you constantly dwell on it,” Tennell said Thursday night.

“I choose to keep it tucked away in the back of my mind. It’s always there, but not like on a billboard, kind of in a drawer.”

Once again, she has put herself in a strong position to take the title, winning the short program at the U.S. Championships for the fourth straight year, this time with a self-assured, sassy performance to music by the indie band, Florence + the Machine in a Las Vegas arena with no spectators. The free skate is Friday night.

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Reality check: Audrey Shin is what’s happening in U.S. women’s skating

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Reality check: Audrey Shin is what’s happening in U.S. women’s skating

The first thing Audrey Shin asked her parents in Colorado when they spoke by phone after she skated the short program at Skate America in Las Vegas was, “Did this actually happen?”

The “this” in question was the near flawless, self-assured performance that had put Shin in third place, beginning two days in late October that ended with her as the surprising star of her first senior Grand Prix event. But even her parents’ reassurance that they saw how well their 16-year-old daughter had skated could not assuage all of Shin’s desire to pinch herself.

“It was already on YouTube, so I watched it a few times in a row right after we talked because I was really proud of what I did,” she said in an interview last week. “After a while, it kind of finally sunk in.”

The disconnect between what had happened – and how well Shin would do again in the free skate to win the bronze medal – and what she had envisioned was understandable.

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

Bradie Tennell was frustrated.

Three years after she had gone from “who?” to “wow!,” jumping from ninth to first at the U.S. Championships in just one season and then becoming the highest U.S. finisher at both the 2018 Olympics and world championships, Tennell felt as if she were spinning her wheels.

It wasn’t as if the figure skater from north suburban Chicago no longer was getting solid results. Last season, despite a foot injury in late summer, she became the first U.S. woman to qualify for the Grand Prix Final since 2015 and the first to win a Four Continents Championship medal (bronze) since 2017. She also completed a full set of medals at nationals, adding 2020 bronze to her 2018 gold and 2019 silver.

“But I was getting older, and I didn’t feel I was reaching my goals fast enough, and I wasn’t progressing fast enough,” Tennell said.

Tennell was increasingly annoyed by her failure to get traction on her goal of adding another spin to one jump, the Axel. She wanted to master the triple Axel, a jump that is turning into something of a litmus test for elite women the way it did for elite men in the 1980s.

It reached the point where, at age 22, she would explain the frustration during a recent phone interview with a paraphrase of a quote about insanity attributed to Albert Einstein.

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Playing against her type, Bradie Tennell makes a splash at U.S. Championships

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Playing against her type, Bradie Tennell makes a splash at U.S. Championships

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Bradie Tennell punched the air when she finished her winning short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships Thursday night.

For most athletes, that is a common reaction to a strong performance.

For Tennell, whose default mood is self-containment, it was an unusual outpouring of emotion.

And maybe it showed just how well she understood the way her choreographer, Frenchman Benoit Richaud, wanted her to perform a program in which her confident, sometimes sassy skating complimented the staccato, robotic music.

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