At 23, Mariah Bell believes her best is yet to come - including a spot at the Olympics

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At 23, Mariah Bell believes her best is yet to come - including a spot at the Olympics

Memory is an often-imprecise function of the mind. Much of how we remember something owes to the atmosphere of the environment in which it happened, in which we experienced it.

This is especially true of seeing performances live, whether they are athletic, artistic or a combination of both. A brilliant performance in a nearly empty, nearly silent venue often will become less than it was in our memory. The same performance before a cheering or applauding large crowd at a significant event often is remembered as more than it was.

Video allows us to test memory dispassionately against reality. Rarely does such replay of something remembered as spectacular make it look as good upon review, stripped from the emotions and context of the moment.

That is what makes Mariah Bell’s free skate performance at the 2020 U.S. Championships so singular, both for her and everyone who saw it at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina last January.

After each of the several times watching it again to write this story, Bell’s elegant, near flawless skating to k.d. Lang’s haunting interpretation of the emotionally powerful Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah” actually has gotten progressively better than my memory of the live performance having been remarkable.

It was the epitome of what skaters strive for: the “whole package” of jumps, spins, footwork, ice presence, emotion, interpretation and striking body positions, all seamlessly and commandingly executed. At the national championships, with a roaring crowd on its feet 20 seconds before the four-minute performance ended, with tears streaming down Bell’s face before the music stopped.

It was also the unquestioned highlight of the then 23-year-old Bell’s lengthy and, at times, exasperatingly inconsistent career. It took her from third after the short program to second overall, the most impressive result in her eight seasons as a senior skater, beaten only by phenom Alysa Liu’s point-gobbling jumps. Under pressure in a major event, Bell finally had gotten past being undone by the final jump in her free skate.

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

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Bradie Tennell moving forward in fresh start, aiming for triple Axel

Bradie Tennell was frustrated.

Three years after she had gone from “who?” to “wow!,” jumping from ninth to first at the U.S. Championships in just one season and then becoming the highest U.S. finisher at both the 2018 Olympics and world championships, Tennell felt as if she were spinning her wheels.

It wasn’t as if the figure skater from north suburban Chicago no longer was getting solid results. Last season, despite a foot injury in late summer, she became the first U.S. woman to qualify for the Grand Prix Final since 2015 and the first to win a Four Continents Championship medal (bronze) since 2017. She also completed a full set of medals at nationals, adding 2020 bronze to her 2018 gold and 2019 silver.

“But I was getting older, and I didn’t feel I was reaching my goals fast enough, and I wasn’t progressing fast enough,” Tennell said.

Tennell was increasingly annoyed by her failure to get traction on her goal of adding another spin to one jump, the Axel. She wanted to master the triple Axel, a jump that is turning into something of a litmus test for elite women the way it did for elite men in the 1980s.

It reached the point where, at age 22, she would explain the frustration during a recent phone interview with a paraphrase of a quote about insanity attributed to Albert Einstein.

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

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A taller Alysa Liu also hoping to show growth as a skater

Word on the street is Alysa Liu has grown.

The two-time reigning U.S. figure skating champion said that’s true… to a degree. The two inches of height she added between last season and her 15th birthday in August don’t change Liu’s perspective.

“I just went from really short to very short,” Liu said, wryly, via telephone after a training session last week in San Francisco. “I’m up to 5-0. I like the five-foot number, but it’s still short.”

Anyway, the more important measure will be how much Liu has grown as a skater since her successful 2019-20 debut in international junior competition.

As is the case for all skaters, especially those in North America, such skating growth risks being temporarily stunted by restrictions on training and lack of competition caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And physical growth, even if it is only two inches, can also be problematic.

In Liu’s case, issues related to the pandemic have complicated her sudden shift to a new coaching team in late June, when she announced a split from Laura Lipetsky, who had coached her since age 5. Cancellation of the Junior Grand Prix series is giving Liu more travel-free time to adapt to the new situation, although, ironically, travel restrictions are keeping her from having the two-country, three-coach arrangement work the way it was planned.

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Latest news on figure skating scoring changes? I stumbled upon that needle in the haystack

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Latest news on figure skating scoring changes? I stumbled upon that needle in the haystack

The International Skating Union sure doesn’t make it easy.

In mid-May, it published two communications about significant changes to the scale of values and grades of execution used to score and judge singles and pairs skating. There was no email alerting media to the changes. I learned of them from a figure skating official who had received the communications.

In mid-June, with the Covid-19 pandemic having put the viability of the 2020-21 season in serious doubt, the ISU said it was suspending the changes published in May. Once again, there was no media notification of the decision.

Only because ISU vice-president Alexander Lakernik of Russia had told me last month that there would be further news about the suspended changes this week, I went to the ISU web site Friday morning to look.

There was nothing under the “Latest News” rubric at the top of the web site (see photo above.) And nothing on the entire front page of the web site. But, just for the heck of it, I clicked on the “Communications” link near the very bottom of the front page.

And discovered that a communication about the changes to the changes had been published two days earlier.

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Ten years later, Queen Yuna’s iconic crown glitters with transcendent brilliance

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Ten years later, Queen Yuna’s iconic crown glitters with transcendent brilliance

How could a 19-year-old woman achieve perfection while bearing an entire nation’s hopes and the baggage of its past, while 50 million South Koreans stood on her shoulders as she tried to stay upright while doing triple jumps on a slippery surface with knife-thin blades?

That is what Yuna Kim did 10 years ago on this date, lifting spirits in her homeland and elevating herself into a singular place in Olympic history by winning the women’s figure skating title at the 2010 Winter Games.

How? Even Kim still marvels over that, as she said in an email interview done this month through her management company. Even now, the moment confounds her, brings back the nervousness she had in Vancouver and, as it did then, makes her teary-eyed because she feels overwhelmed.

“I always wonder how I did it, and every time I watch, it doesn’t seem real,” she said.

She had not only won South Korea’s first Olympic figure skating gold medal but had beaten an exceptionally talented Japanese rival for it, a fact of no small consequence given the complicated history of relations between Japan and South Korea for five centuries. Sports competitions between the two countries had always been freighted with nationalistic implications.

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