With short program win, Karen Chen rebounds from previous hardships in style

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With short program win, Karen Chen rebounds from previous hardships in style

Karen Chen had next.

That is how it looked after the 2015 U.S. Championships, as Chen, then 15, stole the show in the free skate and took third overall in her first U.S. championship as a senior, when she was too young to go to senior worlds.

And, if the only performance you'd seen of Chen's since then was during Thursday's short program at the 2017 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Kansas City, you would have thought to yourself, "Just what everyone expected."

The 4-foot-11-inch Chen was commanding. Her jumps were powerful, her body positions eye-catching, her spins compelling, and her edge work exquisite, all creating the essence of the swan she embodied while skating to music from the film, On Golden Pond, a program she choreographed herself.

She took first place with 72.82 points, the highest short program score ever recorded at the U.S. championships, topping the previous mark of 72.12 Gracie Gold set in 2014. Mirai Nagasu finished second at 71.95, and three-time champion Ashley Wagner rounded out the top three with 70.94 points.

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Mirai Nagasu finds herself in a better place

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Mirai Nagasu finds herself in a better place

The connection had only audio, but you still could see Mirai Nagasu smiling during a media teleconference last week.

Both the tone of her voice and the content of her answers transmitted an image of happiness.

It was an emotion that long had been muted publicly in Nagasu, making the sound of it the most pleasant of surprises, especially since her Grand Prix results this season would not seem a cause for joy.

"This is the first time in a couple years I'm actually really excited to go to nationals and show everyone what I am practicing and what I am capable of," Nagasu told the media on the call.

At age 23 -- yes, still only 23 and about to make a 10th straight appearance in the senior division at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships -- it felt as if the 13-year-old version of Mirai Nagasu was with us again.

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Skating champion Gracie Gold: "I'm forgiving myself for failing"

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Skating champion Gracie Gold: "I'm forgiving myself for failing"

All of us who heard Gracie Gold’s words after she came undone in the free skate at last year’s World Figure Skating Championships in Boston were stunned by how extreme her reaction sounded.

She called her performance "unfortunate and sad."  She said she was ashamed of how she skated. She apologized to the country and the crowd for doing so poorly and finishing fourth after having won the short program.  She nearly wrote off her chances for doing well at the 2018 Olympics.

Truth be told, Gold’s really poor skating was yet to come.  She staggered to fourth and eighth at her two Grand Prix events this fall and then a dismaying sixth at a lower-level Croatian competition in which she barely could land a jump and wound up with her worst scores in nearly four years.

Only recently has Gold realized that her feelings about Boston were an overreaction that kept compounding the problem.  She could not move on because she would not pardon herself.

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Athletes save the Olympics from their leaders' big lies

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Athletes save the Olympics from their leaders' big lies

Oh, how the International Olympic Committee must yearn for the good old days of 1999, when revelations of bribes for bid city votes led to the worst scandal in the hoary (or should that be whorey?) history of the IOC.

Because as bad as that was, 2016 was even worse.

That is a painful irony given that years with an Olympics usually leave enough good recollections to wipe the seamier ones from the public memory bank.

Not so in 2016, even if the underlying point of this column, as it has been in each of the 30 years for which I have given international sports awards, still is to celebrate the best athletes in sports for whom an Olympic gold medal is the ultimate prize.

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Jumping wizards make possibilities seem endless

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Jumping wizards make possibilities seem endless

After winning the Grand Prix Final for the fourth straight year, Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan was playing around during practice for the event's exhibition gala.

To a men's figure skater in 2016, this is what "playing around" means: He tried a quadruple salchow, followed by a half loop, followed by...another quad salchow.

Yes, he fell on the second salchow, but still: a quad-quad combination?

"He gets pretty excited/competitive on those practices," said Hanyu's coach, Brian Orser, in a text message. "I saw a quad axel once on one of those practices!"

Maybe the exclamation point is no longer even necessary in an era when the quad jumping progression has gone from arithmetic to exponential.

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