Making World Championships put Andrew Torgashev ahead of his skating game plan

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Making World Championships put Andrew Torgashev ahead of his skating game plan

The season wasn’t supposed to go this way for Andrew Torgashev.

Torgashev came into it hoping only to remind everyone he was not done competing after two straight seasons lost to a lingering foot injury, to show that a one-time phenom who had won the U.S. junior title eight years ago at age 13 could get back in the mix with the top American men.

“I was planning to get back to training after nationals and come back to competition with more quads next season in hopes to make the world team,” he said.

His coach, Rafael Arutunian, had the same plan.

Both were duly surprised when Torgashev won the free skate at the U.S. Championships, finished third overall behind Ilia Malinin and Jason Brown, and was provisionally named with them to the U.S. team for next week’s world championships in Saitama, Japan.

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

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Figure skating champion Bradie Tennell, a competitive ‘shark,’ making comeback in new waters

A week after chronic foot pain forced Bradie Tennell to withdraw from the 2022 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, the impact of that situation hit her full force.

Tennell was the defending national champion, a good bet to make the 2022 Olympic team had she been healthy. But she was lying in bed in her family home in the Chicago suburbs as nationals was going on in Nashville.

She had lost the chance to realize her dream of skating in another Olympic Games. She had lost an entire competitive season. Then she realized a fundamental part of her also had been lost when walking to the kitchen became so painful it was easier to stay hungry until someone could bring her food.

“In my core, I’m an athlete,” Tennell said via telephone in an interview last week. “I take so much pride in being able to demand pretty much anything of my body and being able to do it. If I want to go on a 10-mile hike, I can go on a 10-mile hike. This was like my identity as an athlete being so suddenly ripped away.”

This lengthy phone and text interview was the first time the two-time U.S. champion and 2018 Olympian had spoken at length about what she described as an “honestly traumatic experience.”

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

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Still just 16, Alysa Liu has met the challenges of going from insouciant prodigy to world medalist

You look at Alysa Liu, and you see a 16-year-old with braces, and it doesn’t seem possible she still is that young because of how much has happened to her in the past four years, all of it in the public eye.

Liu has gone through adolescence under the relentless glare of a spotlight she attracted in January 2019, at age 13, by becoming the youngest U.S. women’s singles champion ever. She was a prodigy who would bear huge expectations for two seasons before she was even eligible to compete at the senior level in her sport.

It all was so easy at the start, with one landmark achievement after another, a second U.S. title in 2020, victories on the Junior Grand Prix circuit, history-making triple axel and quadruple jumps.

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With personal best in worlds short, Mariah Bell aging like a fine wine

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With personal best in worlds short, Mariah Bell aging like a fine wine

In women’s singles skating, where youth has been served over the last 30 years, it is easy to think of a 25-year-old as a woman of a certain age.

So it was a big talking point in January when, at 25, Mariah Bell became the oldest U.S. women’s champion in 95 years and again in February when she became the oldest U.S. woman to compete in Olympic singles in 94 years, finishing 10th.

Now here we are in late March, less than a month before Bell’s 26 birthday, and she is doing the fine wine thing, getting better as time passes.

Call it aging gracefully, which describes Bell’s fluid, elegant skating in Wednesday’s short program at the World Figure Skating Championships in Montpellier, France.

In opening the final competition of a long season – perhaps the final competition of her lengthy career? – Bell had her highest short program score ever and her highest finish ever, third place, in any program at a global championship.

“I absolutely think I’m getting better,” Bell said. “As long as you want to and are dedicated, you can continue to improve.”

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With a likely Olympic team medal, Karen Chen can fill another gap in her career record

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With a likely Olympic team medal, Karen Chen can fill another gap in her career record

Karen Chen was talking before the U.S. Figure Skating Championships about filling a blank on her résumé.

“I told myself, `Karen, you don’t have a nationals silver medal yet,’” Chen said.

Coincidentally – and you will see the coincidence a few paragraphs from now – Chen noted that in answer to a question on a different topic.

It was the question of whether she hoped her performance at nationals would be good enough to earn her a spot in the Olympic team event. Chen did not get that opportunity at her first Olympics in 2018.

There was an element of not counting chickens in Chen’s response, of being more concerned about first assuring the place on the 2022 Olympic team.

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