"Trouble in paradise" between Yuzuru Hanyu and Brian Orser? Coach says no

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"Trouble in paradise" between Yuzuru Hanyu and Brian Orser? Coach says no

It looked strange, to say the least.

There was Yuzuru Hanyu, the world’s most acclaimed active figure skater, waiting by himself in the Kiss and Cry to get his scores after a disappointing short program performance at last week’s Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy. At that moment in a competition, a coach is almost always at the skater’s side.

Once one of Hanyu’s coaches at his Toronto Cricket Club training base, Ghislain Briand, eventually showed up two days late, there would be a simple explanation for why Hanyu had been alone.

And yet even that would not explain why Hanyu’s primary coach, Brian Orser, had not gone to Italy for the second most important competition of the Japanese superstar’s season.

Was there a rift between the skater and the man who had coached him to two Olympic gold medals, two world titles and four Grand Prix Final titles in the seven seasons since Hanyu came to train under Orser?

“I know it looks like there is trouble in paradise, but there isn’t,” Orser said Tuesday via telephone.

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More tests - and harder ones - for Nathan Chen after winning Grand Prix Final in rout

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More tests - and harder ones - for Nathan Chen after winning Grand Prix Final in rout

Over three days last week at the Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy, Nathan Chen passed with honors his first big test of this figure skating season, the usual two-part exam of short and long programs. And he did it with very high marks – his sport’s equivalent of A and A+.

This week in New Haven, Conn., Chen faces what he has found to be the progressively harder tests in the other programs of his two-part life – studying at an elite university and competing with his sport’s elite. They are the four final exams for the first semester of his sophomore year at Yale.

Then Chen returns home to California for what could be the sternest test of all – a month meeting the face-to-face expectations of Rafael Arutunian, his coach.

Arutunian’s pleasure in how brilliantly Chen performed to win a third straight Grand Prix Final gold, especially in a Saturday free skate with exceptional execution of five quadruple jumps, was fading into the past even before the coach left Italy. He wants Chen to be even better with even tougher programs.

“It’s a process, but I think we’re getting there, especially the five quads, which is difficult,” Arutunian said via telephone from Turin. “I’m looking forward to making it even harder.”

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At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

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At Grand Prix Final, Nathan Chen's brilliance nearly defied description - again

What Nathan Chen did in winning the 2019 World Figure Skating Championships was something I never had seen before and wasn’t sure if I would ever see again.

That explains the headline on my nbcsports.com story about Chen’s victory: “By any measure, Nathan Chen’s performance at Worlds matches standard for transcendent greatness”

So it’s no wonder I was left goggle-eyed at what the 20-year-old Chen did in Saturday’s free skate at the Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy.

It was even better than what Chen had done some six months ago at the worlds in Japan.

Not only did Chen decisively beat his rival, two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu of Japan, for a second straight time in a major event, Chen did it on a day when the competitiveness of both figure skaters also was transcendent.

That led me to embark breathlessly on a tweet storm that is the best way to describe all of the brilliance Chen displayed to win a third straight Grand Prix Final title - and the first victory in when he had competed in the event against Hanyu, who missed the last two with injuries.

The tweets cover it all. Here they are:

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1998 Women’s Hockey Team: Opening doors for generations to come

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1998 Women’s Hockey Team: Opening doors for generations to come

Angela Ruggiero’s hockey story was typical for many girls of her generation. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles of the 1980s and early 1990s, she was the only girl on boys’ teams, dressing by herself in girls’ bathrooms at the rink, unable to see much of a hockey future for herself because the few U.S. colleges that had women’s teams at the time were all 3,000 miles to the east.

But when she was 12, Ruggiero got an unexpected opportunity, one that would change her life.

And Ruggiero, in turn, helped change the lives of thousands of girls and young women who followed because she seized on the chance that presented itself July 21, 1992 — the day the International Olympic Committee announced that women’s hockey had been added to the program for the Nagano 1998 Winter Olympic Games.

“It gave me a purpose,” Ruggiero said.

Ruggiero had her mind made up: she wanted to be an Olympian in hockey, her preferred sport of the many she played.

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Erin Popovich: Swimming to her place on the wall

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Erin Popovich: Swimming to her place on the wall

One day about 10 years ago, Erin Popovich was walking down the hall to the pool at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where she was training for her fourth and final International Paralympic Committee Swimming World Championships.

As usual, Popovich passed the gallery of photographs on the hallway wall of champion swimmers who had trained in that pool. Michael Phelps. Janet Evans. Matt Biondi. Natalie Coughlin. And many more — all swimmers she had looked up to during her career. Pictures she had seen very often but that still continued to arrest her eye, even if only in passing.

“It truly was a wall of legends,” she said.

And then, on this day, Popovich stopped in her tracks. There was a new photo of a swimmer on the wall: Erin Popovich.

“No one had told me it was going up there,” she said. “I hope I have done it justice and that it can stay up there a while longer.”

As it turns out, the pictures have come down during a renovation.

But Erin Popovich’s place among U.S. swimming legends is assured forever with her selection to the Class of 2019 of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame.

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