Ashley Wagner douses U.S. medal drought by uncorking her well-aged experience

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BOSTON - It looked as if Gracie Gold was on the verge of ending the U.S. ladies' world championships medal drought with a whimper.

And then Ashley Wagner did it with a bang at the 2016 World Figure Skating Championships, using the intense emotion of her competitive nature to create fireworks in a free skate that rocked a roaring sellout crowd at TD Garden and brought her a silver medal.

It was the first world medal for a U.S. ladies competitor since 2006, when Kimmie Meissner won gold and Sasha Cohen took bronze. The U.S. men have been without a medal since 2009.

Wagner is a 24-year-old who keeps joking about how she is an old lady in the sport. After all, the young woman who beat her with a subtly stirring and record-breaking free skate, Evgenia Medvedeva of Russia, is only 16, and the bronze medalist, Anna Pogorilaya of Russia, just 18.

What Wagner brings at her seemingly advanced age is a performance maturity and an unflagging desire to overcome the many ups and downs of a career that included a worlds debut way back in 2008. The three-time U.S. champion had called herself the "almost" girl, but now that sobriquet can be dispensed with forever.

"I'm like a fine wine, getting better with age -- or at least that's what I like to tell myself," Wagner said. "I'm not old, I'm experienced."

Wagner looked at Medvedeva, sitting next to her during the medalists' press conference, and marveled at what she had seen the Russian do in practices, the skills that allowed her to break Yu-Na Kim's six-year-old world record in the free skate by 0.04 with a score of 150.10 Saturday night.

"I see her doing run-throughs with a triple at the end of every combination and I think, 'Oh, to be 16,'" Wagner said. "Then I remember, I couldn't do that at 16."

What she could do, six weeks before her 25th birthday, was present a program to music from the film Moulin Rouge! with an elan and artistic confidence that the judges rewarded with the highest program components scores of the field. For Wagner, those scores would be the difference between fifth and second place and were enough to overcome the three mistakes (two under-rotations, one edge call) she was dinged for on jumps.

"The fact I won a silver medal because of something I did and not because of something everyone else didn't do is so sweet," Wagner said. 

Medvedeva had a commanding margin of victory, 223.86 to 215.39. Pogorilaya scored 213.69. Gold was fourth (211.29) by 0.68 over Japan's Satoko Miyahara.

It left Gold third before Wagner took the ice as the final skater in the competition.

Truth be told, the 20-year-old Gold had melted down after taking a nearly three-point lead into the free skate. And she was quick to admit it.

"It was a really unfortunate and sad experience," Gold said. "I feel really ashamed of how I skated, and I want to apologize to my country and to the crowd here -- there's really no excuse for it.

"It just shows that I'm not up there with the rest of the world, but maybe in the future I can be a better skater. I still have hopes for the 2018 Olympics, but we'll have to step back and re-evaluate what's realistic for my future skating."

The last time she skated at this venue, Wagner was almost forced to excuse herself for being selected to the 2014 U.S. Olympic team after a dismaying fourth at the U.S. championships. The rules in place clearly justified the decision to send her to Sochi, but there was a public outcry over the exclusion of third-place Mirai Nagasu (who took 10thhere).

Wagner left no doubt that this world silver medal should be hers. On a night when four of the other five skaters who went before her in the final group turned in performances ranging from very good to great to exceptional, Wagner simply outdid all but the untouchable Medvedeva.

"I have had so many people for so many parts of my career say that, 'This has been given to me; I don't deserve this,''' said Wagner, who finished just third at the 2016 U.S. Championships. "I have so many people who doubt why I am still here and why people still support me.

"I earned this silver medal. I knew there had been a bunch of phenomenal skates before me. I put that out of my mind and went out there and did what I needed to do."

It wasn't easy. Wagner had heard the crowd's anguished reaction to Gold's fall and the muted reaction when Gold finished. Her coach, Rafael Arutunian, told her before she got on the ice to seize the opportunity in front of her.

"I had a moment of panic because I knew something had happened in Gracie's performance," Wagner said. "I realized there was an opening and maybe I can get onto this podium. Then I realized freaking out over maybe getting onto a podium wasn't going to do anything for me."

Wagner had finished fifth, seventh, fifth, fourth and 16th at her previous five world championships. She made her first appearance at this competition only two years after the medal drought began, so it meant more to her to be the skater who ended it.

"To go out there against such a strong field and get this medal, I'm very proud of myself and very glad I could accomplish this for U.S. figure skating," she said.

She already could take pride in having been outspoken on important subjects, like gay rights in Russia, that few of her 2014 Olympic teammates were willing to touch. She is unafraid to be critical of seeming unfairness in judging (remember that expression on her face after seeing her scores in Sochi?). She is relentlessly self-critical. She is funny, candid, dauntless.

And a world silver medalist.

(This article originally appeared on icenetwork.)

Javier Fernandez, a skater with duende, has transcendent triumph

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BOSTON - There was a transcendent performance at the 2016 World Figure Skating Championships.

It came not from Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu, the man who had been doing otherworldly stuff all season, but from Javier Fernández, the defending champion whom Hanyu had overshadowed.

His was, simply, the greatest free skate in the history of the world championships, whether you judge it by the point total or the total package of jump difficulty, entertainment quality, competitive courage and stylistic sass Fernández showed Friday night before a near-sellout crowd at TD Garden.

The best way to describe it is with the Spanish word duende. No matter that the word has no exact translation but has come to connote ideas like passion, magnetism, inspiration and guts that add up to an intangible sense of genius.

That -- all of it -- is what Fernández embodied on another step in the improbable journey that has taken a 24-year-old from a country with no figure skating tradition to consecutive world titles and four straight European championships.

On top of that, the second title came on a night when Fernández challenged himself to try the most difficult program content of his career despite a right heel inflammation that made it impossible to practice productively the past two days. He thanked the event's medical team for the treatment, including an ultrasound, that made it possible for him to skate at all, let alone give a performance for the ages.

Fernández had three flawless quadruple jumps, one in a quad-triple combination, with two getting the highest possible Grades of Execution (GOEs) one can achieve. He did two triple axels for the first time in one of his three-quad free skates. He gave a presentation of Frank Sinatra's Guys and Dolls so pitch-perfect, in interpretation and skating prowess, that 26 of his 45 component scores were perfect 10s.

"I actually don't know how I did it," Fernández said. "Sometimes it doesn't matter what happened before."

It didn't matter that Hanyu, the Olympic champion and Fernández' training partner under coach Brian Orser, had a seemingly insurmountable lead of more than 12 points after the short program, when the Spaniard fell on one jump and the Japanese skater missed topping his world record score by less than half a point.

"Before skating, I knew I had a chance to win but that I had to do a clean program, and I did," Fernández said.

A combination of Hanyu's flawed skating and Fernández' brilliance allowed the Spaniard to win by more than 19 points, 314.93 to 295.17. Fernández' free skate score, 216.41, is the second highest ever, behind only Hanyu's 219.48 from this season's Grand Prix Final.

Hanyu put his hand down on the landings of two jumps, a quad and a triple, fell on a second quad and had four negative GOEs. He looked lifeless at points in his 4 minutes, 30 seconds on the ice.

The 2014 Olympic and world champion now has finished second to Fernández at the world championships the past two years.

"I can't explain my feelings," Hanyu said. "I am really tired and really happy for Javi. But I am really sad for my long program. I want to do it again."

China's Boyang Jin slogged his way into third (270.99), becoming the first Chinese man to win a world medal, when three-time world champion Patrick Chan of Canada fell apart to finish eighth in the free skate.

As has happened in the past, the judges still were overly generous to Chan, and that cost the United States a third men's spot at the 2017 World Championships. Chan wound up fifth overall, 2.31 points ahead of Rippon. Had their places been reversed, Rippon and Max Aaron (eighth) would have had the requisite total (13) to keep the third spot.

In a bittersweet touch, Rippon, Aaron and Grant Hochstein (10th) all had career-highlight free skates and gave the United States three men in the top 10 for the first time since 2005. (This was the eighth time the U.S. had three men's entrants in that span.)

The revelation of the week was world championships rookie Mikhail Kolyada, 21, of Russia, who did two clean programs -- with a successful quad in each -- to finish fourth, just three points behind Jin.

In the end, though, it mattered little what anyone but Fernández did. The man from Madrid was a winner with duende. It is rare and hard to define but wonderful to recognize.

(This article originally appeared on icenetwork.)

U.S. ice dancers keep piling up world medals

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BOSTON - In “Fix You,” the Coldplay song ice dancers Maia and Alex Shibutani chose for their free dance this season, the lyrics speak of trying your best but not succeeding and being stuck in reverse.

It was the perfect anthem to describe the previous four seasons of an ice dance career in which the Shibutanis have succeeded at going forward once again.

The surprise world bronze medalists of 2011 became what seemed like almost predictable silver medalists behind Gabriella Papadakis and Guillaume Cizeron of France Thursday night at TD Garden, capping a comeback season in which the siblings from Michigan earlier won their first national and international titles.

"We have had an interesting journey," Maia Shibutani said.

Last year’s silver medalists, Madison Chock and Evan Bates, took the bronze to give the United States two ice dance medals at the same worlds for just the third time ever.

It also happened in 2011 (gold-bronze) and 1966 (silver-bronze.)

After a 20-year medal drought from 1985 until 2005, four different U.S dance teams have won medals in 10 of the last 12 seasons.  That includes two world titles (and the 2014 Olympic gold) by Meryl Davis and Charlie White.

The French team’s second straight world title also represented a comeback, as Papadakis still has headaches from the August concussion that nearly ruined her season.  It happened on a practice fall while doing footwork.

“It was two months before I was skating normally,” she said.  “I had big headaches and trouble focusing.  I still have headaches but nothing that bothers me on the ice.”

Papadakis and Cizeron won both the short and free dances for a comfortable winning margin of 6.01 points.  Chock and Bates were 2.66 behind the Shibutanis, the first ice dancers to win world medals five years apart.

"Our career has definitely been unique," Alex Shibutani said.  "We never thought about such a gap between medals.  We just kept putting one foot in front of the other."