A Little About Rostelecom Cup 2019, and a lot about Gracie Gold

This is the time of the week when I usually make a handful of observations and comments about the GP event of the past weekend, which in this case would be Rostelecom Cup. So for consistency’s sake, my comments are as follows (consider this a tiny “handful”):

+ The Russian men’s sweep? Unsurprising. (Duh, I predicted that podium. As did many others, I suspect.) Shoma Uno did a little better here, finishing 4^th, but his need for a full-time coach to replace the “n/a” we saw on his name key at Rostelecom continues in a big, bad way.

+ The Russian pairs sweep? Oh, wait, there wasn’t one. Germany’s Hase/Seegert won bronze in their first-ever trip to the GP podium. That was cool. (The Russian team that didn’t get it done was Stolbova/Novoselov, who had multiple errors in their free skate.)

+ The dance podium was as I predicted, which means TPTB didn’t get my memo that Gilles/Poirier could win (meaning probably should win). Ah, well.

+  For the ladies, Sasha Trusova won again (despite 2 falls in the FS) but Evgenia Medvedeva stole the show… and probably any hearts she hasn’t already won, especially in her home country. Mariah Bell brought home another bronze GP medal, though I think Bradie Tennell (with a 2^nd and 4^th on this year’s circuit) is a little higher than her on the GPF alternate list due to tiebreaker rules.

I could explain those tiebreaker rules, but I’m gonna let you look them up if you’re really curious. Because I want to spend the rest of this post talking about Gracie Gold.

You may have heard that Gracie officially qualified for the 2020 U.S. Nationals this past weekend after earning bronze at the USFS Eastern Sectionals. While this information was largely presented in social media matter-of-factually and/or with varying degrees of positive subjectivity—at least, as far as I saw—I also read posts treating Gracie’s achievement with disinterest, or even vague disdain. Ho hum, who cares, two other skaters finished ahead of her, why not mention them by name if you’re compelled to mention her? Something like that.

So let’s start there. Are the results of a USFS Eastern Sectional newsworthy? To hard-core fans, sure—and thanks to resources like Twitter, we can seek out said results with ease. But when that Eastern Sectional includes an athlete who won two Grand Prix titles, won the U.S. title twice, finished 4^th at the Sochi Olympics, and finished in the top 6 at four World Championships in a row? Then it becomes newsworthy in a bigger way. Not oh-my-God-she-has-a-shot-at-the-national-podium big, but big enough.

Most people reading this likely know why an athlete with a resume such as Gracie’s was at Eastern Sectionals (and South Atlantic Regionals before that) at all. But if you don’t, it’s easy now to read her recent backstory in the New York Times. Or People magazine. Or Sports Illustrated. Or several other news outlets. 

Disclosing battles with severe depression can generate attention. So can disclosing an eating disorder. So can revealing you “imagined taking your life and nobody finding your body until the landlord came to collect overdue rent,” as Gracie did in the NY Times article. She’s been dealing with all the above, and a lot more, since 2017 Worlds.

But what has stayed with me most about Gracie is what I saw with my own eyes as I watched last year’s Rostelecom Cup (at which she attempted to compete). At the time, I was barely keeping up with weekly Grand Prix predictions and felt a tug of relief that I didn’t “need” to do any sort of Rostelecom postmortem here on the blog. So I kept my worries to myself for the most part: the way Gracie barely seemed to test any jumps during her SP warmup. The program itself, which contained a fall, a completely missed element (double axel), and no successful triple jumps. The piece of hair hanging in Gracie’s face when she finished; a sharp contrast to her pristine upsweeps of the past. Her eyeroll as she pushed said piece of hair out of her face. 

The worried look exchanged between her two coaches as she bent over to adjust her skates in the Kiss’n’Cry.

The way she held her head in her hands as her score went up.

And as I sat in front of the computer for the free skate one day later—dreading what might happen, to be honest—I remember it didn’t start on time. Maybe five minutes went by, maybe more than that. But if you’ve ever watched an ISU event, you know a late start of any kind is rare. And by the time the results page was finally saying The first warm-up group is on the ice, Gracie’s name was missing from the list of skaters. As I recall, they didn’t even have her name up there with a “WD” alongside it. It was just missing. For the duration of the warm-up. (It returned just as news of Gracie’s withdrawal from Rostelecom started circulating on Twitter.)

Her own explanation of her choice to scratch from the event came hours later, on Twitter… and it was clear her SP performance played a big part in the decision. But in those moments leading up to the (delayed) start of the free skate, I found myself ridiculously worried about Gracie. Admittedly, my mind tends to shoot to worst-case-scenario mode in a hurry for most anything. So that didn’t help.

But this whole scenario was rather unprecedented in any sport, let alone the seemingly made-for-TV drama that figure skating tends to be. So my mind kept swimming with speculation: Is she OK? Did she have another breakdown? Did it happen right there at the arena as she got ready to compete? Dammit, why did The Powers That Be let her go to Russia for this event at all??

Then, after she’d clarified things later: How much of a setback will this be for her? Six months? A year? Will she still be able to make a comeback now? Should she even try?

I wasn’t surprised after that when she withdrew from Nationals; I don’t think many of us were. In that space between Rostelecom (November) and the start of Nationals (January), nobody in the media seemed sure of the right thing to say about Gracie.  On the NBC coverage of Rostelecom Cup, there was only about 30 matter-of-fact seconds about Gracie’s attempt to compete (along with an obligatory “we wish her the best”). Both Phil Hersh and Christine Brennan—two sports journalists as well-known to figure skating fans as their respective aversions to mincing words—wrote pieces about Gracie’s withdrawal in early January that were carefully constructed to neither discourage her comeback efforts nor encourage a world of additional progress.

It wasn’t until Nationals weekend itself, when the NY Times article came out, that the depths of Gracie’s issues became transparent enough to REALLY talk about.

She’s done a lot of talking, both about mental health in general and hers in detail, since the start of this year. It’s a brave move on her part; for those of us following along that have endured mental health crises of our own, it’s perhaps as cathartic for us as it is for her. But the physical and, if she wishes, competitive comeback is still a work in progress. Which brings me back to what she accomplished last weekend, 365 or so days after her Rostelecom Cup withdrawal.

Gracie has qualified for 2020 U.S. Nationals. The last time she competed at Nats in 2017 she finished in 6^th place, parted ways with coach Frank Carroll before the event was over, and (reportedly) put her U.S. team jacket in a trash can. (I think it was also reported that she quietly retrieved said jacket a little later.)

A year later, she didn’t compete but sat in the stands, making self-deprecating jokes and opining about the athletes on Twitter.

A year after that, she wasn’t there at all.

When you battle the kind of demons Gracie Gold has, and have a livelihood that documents your highs and lows so publicly, and so very vividly… how can you persevere at a time when most anyone else in “battle mode” does well just to get through a day without succumbing to the fetal position?

I’m keeping my eye on her for the answer, for exactly as long as she wants to work towards it.