The positive? The 16-year-old who began looking a year ago like the next leader of U.S. women’s figure skating was the surprise gold medalist at the Four Continents Championships in Seoul, South Korea.
The negative? The 19-year-old who had been the top U.S. woman over the previous two seasons was positively poor in Sunday’s free skate of an event with a field she should have beaten easily.
So Polina Edmunds of San Jose, just fourth at the U.S. Championships last month, won the first significant senior event of her career by coming from fourth after the short program,.
And Gracie Gold, U.S. champion and fourth in the Olympics last season, dropped from second to fourth with her lowest total score (176.58) since the 2013 Four Continents Championships.
“I skated poorly in both phases of the competition,” Gold said in quotes supplied by the International Skating Union. “I’m sorry about that.”
The positives as she tries to regroup for next month’s World Championships in Shanghai, where the Russian regiment joins the battle?
Gold, second to Ashley Wagner at nationals, stayed upright during her fifth-place free skate.
She can take encouragement from the example of men’s winner Denis Ten of Kazakhstan, who two years ago went from 12th (12th!!) at Four Continents to second in the world meet six weeks later. Maybe Ten can tell her how he did it, since they both are coached by Frank Carroll in Los Angeles.
The negatives? Confidence issues that cropped up before Gold moved to the senior level seem to be back.
Sunday’s four-minute free skate went bad after just 30 seconds, when her planned triple lutz-triple toe loop combination became a single-double. Twenty seconds later, she finished a planned double axel-triple toe with a two-footed clunk on the landing of a toe loop she doubled.
After recovering with two solid spins and three essentially clean triple jumps, Gold came undone again on her final planned combination: the planned 3-2-2 became a 3-1-1. And her final jump, a double axel, barely drew a positive grade of execution.
She finished more than seven points behind Edmunds (184.02), who was followed by two Japanese skaters, Satoko Miyahara (181.59) and Rika Hongo (177.44.)
While comparing scores is difficult, the lowest of the three Russians who swept the podium at last month’s European Championships got 191.81. The top two were nearly 20 points higher.
Wagner chose not to compete at Four Continents, open to skaters from the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Edmunds kept places on both the Four Continents and world meet teams because the third place finisher at nationals, Karen Chen, 15, did not meet the age minimum.
Edmunds was more competent than brilliant in her winning free skate, with negative grades on two elements. But her performance was a significant step forward in a season when she has struggled with physical growth issues.
“This is my first international competition with two clean programs, so I am happy about that,” Edmunds said. “I have great momentum going into worlds.”
Edmunds is not intimidated by the Russians, even if she never has beaten one in the four senior competitions where they have met (she is 0-for-7 against them.)
“I don’t think the Russians are stronger than any one of us,” she said. “I’m optimistic it’s not going to be, ‘The Russians are coming.'”
