After a highly decorated career, Ashley Wagner is proudest of current chapter in her story

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After a highly decorated career, Ashley Wagner is proudest of current chapter in her story

At this time four years ago, Ashley Wagner was beginning the final months of training for what she reasonably could have expected would lead to her second Olympic appearance after having won an Olympic team event bronze medal in 2014.

Sure, her 2016-17 season had been a struggle, with a subpar seventh-place performance at the World Championships. But that was still her sixth straight worlds, and, among U.S. women, only Michelle Kwan has a longer consecutive appearance streak.

Beyond that, Wagner had skated to a silver medal at the 2016 Worlds, to this day the only medal by a U.S. woman at worlds since 2006. And Wagner had been just five points from a medal at the 2015 Worlds, when she was third in the free skate.

In October 2017, no one could have foreseen Bradie Tennell going from relative unknown to 2018 U.S. champion or Mirai Nagasu putting it together for a stunning performance when it counted most, at the 2018 U.S. Championships. Wagner, a three-time U.S. champion, and Karen Chen, the 2017 champion, were, at that point, seemingly the best bets to claim spots on the team going to South Korea, with the third and final spot up for grabs.

Four months later, after a workmanlike, unremarkable performance at nationals, Wagner would be the odd woman out.

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Using new recognition from social media, Elladj Baldé champions skaters of color

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Using new recognition from social media, Elladj Baldé champions skaters of color

Figure skater Elladj Baldé and his fiancée, dancer-choreographer Michelle Dawley, were driving in their Calgary, Alberta, neighborhood in mid-December when they noticed a patch of open ice in a field. It was deep into the pandemic lockdown, when places to skate were hard to come by, and Baldé, who had his skates in the car, wanted to commemorate the find.

“Let’s make a video,” Baldé said.

As Dawley recorded on an iPhone, Baldé pulled on his skates, ran out of his car across snow-covered grass and onto the ice, did a celebratory backflip, then some hip-hop dance moves. His open plaid shirt flapped over a hoodie, and his enthusiasm poured out.

The recording took 10 minutes, from filming to laying in music by Rihanna. It became 20 seconds on TikTok, where Baldé said he had only a couple hundred followers at the time.

That – and Baldé’s life – would change quickly.

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

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Virus put Grand Prix plans on hold for Orser's international skating stars

Over the past decade, the Toronto club where Brian Orser coached South Korea’s Yuna Kim to the 2010 Olympic title has become such an attraction for top figure skaters from around the globe that it could add a word to a name that already is a mouthful.

You could call it the Toronto International Cricket Skating and Curling Club.

But its reach now is limited by the deadly virus pandemic that has effectively frozen out the elite athletes from Japan, Russia, South Korea and Poland who train at the Cricket Club.

That situation won’t change quickly, even with the International Skating Union having announced Monday its plans to proceed with a live format for the international Grand Prix Series. This fall, it will become a series of six essentially domestic competitions scheduled to begin with Skate America Oct. 23-25 in Las Vegas.

If they take place.

“As soon as the skaters can come back, it will be full steam ahead… to where, we don’t know,” Orser said via telephone Wednesday.

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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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Can U.S. pair Calalang and Johnson repeat their shining moment?

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Can U.S. pair Calalang and Johnson repeat their shining moment?

Recent results would dissuade anyone from getting carried away over what seems a breakthrough performance by a U.S. pair.

Such performances have happened off-and-on in the past few decades, but not since 2011 has a U.S. pair finished in the top six at the World Championships. And not since 1996 has a U.S. pair won a world medal in a non-Olympic year. (Post-Olympic fields at worlds generally are watered down by the absence of the new Olympic medalists.) And not since 2002 has a U.S. pair won a world medal in any year. And only once (2015) since 2007 has a U.S. pair made it to the Grand Prix Final.

Even with those historical caveats, there is reason to be hopeful about Jessica Calalang and Brian Johnson.

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