Gracie Gold faces her traumatic past in stunningly candid memoir

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Gracie Gold faces her traumatic past in stunningly candid memoir

It is tempting to see Gracie Gold’s story mainly as a compelling cautionary tale about the mental health risks of a sport in which the pursuit of excellence must start when athletes still are children.

It is also tempting to see Gold’s story as sui generis, the result of a childhood, adolescence and young adulthood spent in a family whose dysfunction she describes with raw detail in the memoir, OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, published Tuesday.

Seeing it as one or the other would be a simplistic reaction to a story so complex it recalls a landmark 1957 movie, “The Three Faces of Eve.”

Rather than Eve’s multiple personalities, Gold had three different personas.

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Evan Lysacek's golden performances seem surreal to him 10 years later

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Evan Lysacek's golden performances seem surreal to him 10 years later

Last month, when Evan Lysacek was speaking to students in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in his role as a sports envoy for the U.S. Department of State, the presentation included a showing of his figure skating short program and free skate from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Lysacek rarely skates these days. He last did something that could be called a public performance when Ice Theatre of New York honored him in October 2016. With an ankle ligament still sore from a misstep injury that threatened to have him in a cast for his wedding last Dec. 14, he shuffled briefly around the ice while working with skaters in Malaysia

That detachment from the sport has made it difficult for him to believe what he was seeing in the video of the greatest performances of his career.

“It’s surreal to watch,” Lysacek said. “When I think of what it took to get there, I think, ‘How did I ever do that?’”

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On Karen Chen's first Olympics and Frank Carroll's last

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On Karen Chen's first Olympics and Frank Carroll's last

Frank Carroll's 12th and final Olympics as a coach ended a day earlier than expected.

Although the premature finish owed to the misfortune of his last Olympic student, Denis Ten of Kazakhstan, it turned out to be advantageous for Carroll, 79, who left for home in Southern California on Saturday, the day after Ten failed to qualify for the free skate.

"I'm sick as a dog," Carroll wrote in a text message Sunday, calling his illness "cold-like but getting worse."

Ten, the 2014 Olympic bronze medalist and two-time world medalist, placed 27th of 30 in Friday's short program. Only the top 24 made Saturday's free skate.

His poor performance was not a surprise, given the foot problems that have plagued Ten since the 2015-16 season and were exacerbated by a severe ankle injury suffered last August. Ten, 24, said Friday it was painful even to put on skating boots.

"It has been incredible," Carroll said of his Olympic coaching career.

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