The legendary Peggy Fleming has always maintained that her sport, figure skating, offers the most accurate window through which to view the heart and soul of an athlete.
“Our sport is very revealing to what the character of the skater is all about,” she once told me.
It made sense: the singles skater is alone on the ice, totally exposed, unable to take a break or rely on a teammate. It’s just him or her, stand up or fall down, win or lose.
And so it was Saturday night for Ashley Wagner, who became the first American woman in 10 years to win a world championship medal when she stormed to an unexpected but entirely deserved silver with a riveting performance at the 2016 championships.
She’s 24, to turn 25 in six weeks, and she has already lived a lifetime or two or three in her sport. She nearly quit five years ago because she couldn’t pay the extensive bills that mount in skating until the foundation of Olympian and national champion Michael Weiss offered her a scholarship and a path to continue. She left her home and family on the East coast to find the best and toughest coaches out west. She took a part-time job at a Lucky Brand jeans store in a Southern California mall.
In other words, she was living a real life, and not necessarily an easy one. She never played it safe. She always said what she believed in press conferences, which is almost unheard of in a judged sport. She would criticize her own skating if she felt it was deserved. She would famously criticize Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay law, not once, but any time she was asked, all the way to the 2014 Olympics in Russia, where almost any other athlete would never have taken such a risk.
An ice princess she is not. And you know what? It showed in TD Garden Saturday night, just as Fleming has always said it would. It showed in the way Wagner took the ice, so pleasantly confident and self-assured in the face of withering pressure. She was the last skater of the evening, and she knew she would have to be almost perfect to win a medal. And then she was.
When the enticing music of her signature Moulin Rouge program rose to its crescendo, when Wagner built to her toughest triple jump in the waning seconds of the program, when a fall would have ruined her medal chances, the bold lyrics were so telling: “The show must go on.”
Nothing like skating to a metaphor for your life.
It has been thought for a while that if someone could combine Wagner’s fire and heart with Gracie Gold’s talent, you’d have one heck of a skater. But the truth is, you have one heck of a skater in Wagner, period. At an age when most female skaters are long gone from the sport, Wagner has been deconstructing and relearning the way she jumps and trains, simply to get better. Her coach of three years, Rafael Arutunian, is a demanding task master, but she’s all in, and she’s now the second best skater in the world because of it.
“I was doing jumps one way for 10 years, and now I’m doing them the way Raf wants me to do them,” she said. “We’re just drilling and drilling. I’ve completely upgraded the skater I am.”
This should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has been watching U.S. skating over the past five seasons, during which time Wagner has won three national titles and been a major player on the world stage.
She fights for everything she gets, and that’s not going to stop. Several hours after Wagner’s strong showing, Arutunian said he would be sitting down with her soon to talk about their plan for the next two years, including the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Of course that’s what they're going to talk about. It’s another opportunity, and Wagner undoubtedly will take it. Always has, always will.
