Gracie Gold giving fuller accounting of herself as skater, person

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Gracie Gold giving fuller accounting of herself as skater, person

Gold, buoyed by having twin sister Carly make nationals for the first time, insists she is even better trained for this year’s meet than she had been for the Grand Prix Final.  Her coach, the venerable Frank Carroll, agrees.

“She is as prepared as she has ever been or any human being could be,” Carroll said while walking to Gold’s Wednesday afternoon practice at the Xcel Energy Center.  “If she doesn’t do well here, it’s psychological.”

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For U.S. champion Ashley Wagner, it's back to the future at skate nationals

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For U.S. champion Ashley Wagner, it's back to the future at skate nationals

Earlier this week, Ashley Wagner dredged through a virtual scrapbook to tweet a picture of the last time she had skated in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

It was at the 2008 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, her first as a senior, when she was four months shy of her 17th birthday.  She finished third, as she had a year before in the junior event at both nationals and worlds.  This was an athlete on the way up.

That the sometimes jagged arc of her ensuing career has brought Wagner back to St. Paul this week to seek a fourth U.S. title at age 24 – a victory would make her, by a few months, the oldest women’s champion since Beatrix Loughran in 1926 – is a testament to her resoluteness.

Or, as she would put it, to her being stubborn and hard-headed.

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In surreal turn, condemnation of IAAF leaders exempts President Sebastian Coe

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In surreal turn, condemnation of IAAF leaders exempts President Sebastian Coe

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I was able to watch a theater of the absurd drama live from Munich, Germany Thursday morning.

All it lacked were sets by either Dali or Magritte behind the dais occupied by Richard Pound of Canada and his fellow luminaries on the World Anti-Doping Agency independent commission that investigated the sordid behavior that festered inside the international track and field federation.

The production was meant to elucidate a commission report that iterated and reiterated top elected officials of the IAAF – its Council – had to be aware of the rot within the organization.

It will be remembered instead for the surreal plot twist in which Pound repeatedly and unwaveringly defended the idea of letting 12-year Council member Sebastian Coe of Great Britain lead the federation out of the mess.

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To clean up track and field, Seb Coe too must go

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To clean up track and field, Seb Coe too must go

When the other size 20EEE clodhopper drops in the international track and field doping and corruption scandal Thursday, let’s hope somebody quickly puts the shoe back on to boot the entire compromised leadership of the sport’s global governing body, the IAAF.

That would necessarily include the federation’s new president, Sebastian Coe of Great Britain, whose vow he can be part of the solution means less because he did not see how he was part of the problem and apparently still doesn’t fully grasp it.

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At 11, a blazing performance makes South Korea's You Young a senior (!) national figure skating champion with time on her hands

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At 11, a blazing performance makes South Korea's You Young a senior (!) national figure skating champion with time on her hands

A Korean girl shot across the figure skating universe like a comet over the weekend.

And while she certainly could blaze another such trail in the future, it may seem for a while that You Young is on a path like Halley’s Comet, which comes around about every 75 years.

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