Keeping promise to herself, figure skater Karen Chen looks for an Olympic redo

Keeping promise to herself, figure skater Karen Chen looks for an Olympic redo

Karen Chen left the 2018 Winter Olympics so disappointed over the subpar performances that left her in 11th place that she immediately vowed to try again.

“When I got off the ice, I remember telling myself, `You’ve got to go for another four years. This was not your dream,’” Chen said in a recent media conference.

Yet a season later, after battling an injury that kept her out of all but one minor competition, Chen no longer was so sure.

She had been admitted to Cornell University, which would mean both training far from her coaching team in Colorado Springs and chasing around near the college to find ice time. She had struggled with boot-related foot problems for years. She had accomplished the original part of her dream, which was simply making the Olympics.

Before her first semester of college, Chen thought about calling it a competitive career at age 19. She had a family meeting to discuss the issue and wound up deciding both to give it another go and also that she wanted to be a full-time student at the Ithaca, New York, school.

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Alysa Liu changes coaches, location a month and a half before Olympic figure skating team selected

Alysa Liu changes coaches, location a month and a half before Olympic figure skating team selected

Two-time senior national champion Alysa Liu, the most successful U.S. women’s figure skater this season, has changed coaches barely two months before the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.

The skater’s father, Arthur Liu, confirmed the switch Monday morning in a text to NBCSports.com.

Two days after returning from the NHK Trophy in Tokyo, which ended Nov. 14, Liu left coaches Massimo Scali and Jeremy Abbott in the San Francisco Bay Area and went to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to train with Christy Krall, Drew Meekins and Viktor Pfeifer.

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