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Post by Admin on May 1, 2019 18:29:35 GMT
The wild ride that has been Vincent Zhou’s 2018-19 season skidded to a momentary halt recently.  “I had a little accident,” the reigning world bronze medalist explained ruefully in a phone interview with TeamUSA.org this week. Stepping onto the ice at a recent Stars on Ice tour stop, “I took a little fall, and something went off in my knee.”  Though Zhou says the left knee injury isn’t severe and won’t impact his preparation for the 2019-20 season, it has necessitated crutches, a course of treatment and time off the ice for the moment, something the affable, adaptable Zhou has embraced as a small twist of fate — one of many that has permeated an already eventful career. Patience with fate has been a virtue for Zhou this season. After a sixth-place finish at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, where he distinguished himself by becoming the first skater ever to land a quadruple lutz at the Games, and a small bronze medal in the short program at the 2018 world championships, Zhou approached the 2018-19 season hoping to remain on a high. A string of off-podium finishes — fourth at the U.S. International Classic, an ISU Challenger Series event in September, then fifth and fourth, respectively, at his ISU Grand Prix assignments, Skate America and NHK Trophy — quickly shattered those illusions, leaving the 18-year-old pondering what he was doing wrong. “I’m the type of person who just tries to focus on myself and tries not to think about placement, but being a perfectionist it’s always in the back of my head,” Zhou admitted. “I was expecting a little too much out of myself after having such incredible skates at the Olympics and then placing top three in the short program at worlds. I just got a little ahead of myself, maybe. I had to sit back and ask myself what’s going on and how can I make it better?” |
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Post by Admin on Jan 17, 2021 4:10:13 GMT
Zhou, sixth at the 2018 Olympics and bronze medalist at the last worlds in 2019, has a chance to beat Chen for the first time in 11 career head-to-heads on the senior level. Zhou did defeat Chen, who is 17 months older, in 2013 to become the youngest U.S. men’s junior champion in history.
“I don’t specifically think about beating people,” Zhou said Saturday. “I focus on myself.”
But Zhou said in October that he was trying to break the perception of being “just another kid who can do quads” and make a name for himself “instead of being talked about as Nathan Chen No. 2 or an underdog competitor or something like that.”
“We all just put whoever’s at the top on this pedestal and anybody not on that pedestal automatically just has no chance of winning in our minds,” Zhou said Saturday, including himself among those who fall into that mindset. “Anything can happen.”
A year ago, Zhou came into nationals on three weeks of training after failing to balance skating with freshman classes at Brown University. He considered quitting skating, but ultimately put academics on hold, moved to Toronto and began training in a new environment after four months off the ice.
“I could barely do a triple Axel,” Zhou, who since moved to Colorado, remembered Saturday. That made his fourth-place performance at 2020 Nationals — with a pair of landed quadruple jumps — “a huge personal victory.”
He placed second to Chen at October’s Skate America — a distant 24.05 points behind — with two injured ankles alleviated by Advil, he said. Zhou took two weeks off after that, then, on his first day back, threw out his back doing a single-rotation jump and missed two more weeks.
Zhou said on NBC after Saturday’s skate that he was at “the beginning of the summit push of a climb.” He could have been referencing all his work in the last year in pursuit of a first national title.
Or his whole career, which began with skating lessons at age 5 after attending a friend’s birthday party at a rink. Zhou said in October that he plans to switch his focus from skating to school after the 2022 Olympics in Beijing, where his parents lived before moving to the U.S. in the early 1990s.
“In the past it was as if he was skating to beat Nathan Chen,” NBC Sports analyst Johnny Weir said on the broadcast. “Now it feels like he’s skating for himself.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 26, 2022 18:10:26 GMT
Vincent Zhou of the U.S. used a strong free skate to catapult from sixth after his short program to earn the bronze medal at the figure skating world championships in Montpellier, France, on Saturday. Olympic bronze medalist Shoma Uno of Japan concluded a dominant performance to win the gold medal.  Uno finished with 312.48 points to easily outdistance Yuma Kagiyama, who finished second to his Japanese teammate in both the short program and free skate. Kagiyama had 297.60 points while Zhou finished with 277.38. It was an emotional and redemptive performance for the 21-year-old Zhou, who helped the Americans win team silver at the Beijing Games — a medal that could be elevated to gold pending a Russian doping investigation. Zhou was preparing for the men’s competition when he tested positive for the coronavirus, knocking him out of the rest of his Olympics. He was forced to spend nearly two weeks in quarantine before he was finally allowed out in time to perform in the closing exhibition gala, then was deemed a “close contact” and barred from the closing ceremony. |
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Post by Admin on Mar 28, 2022 7:57:26 GMT
 Vincent Zhou apologized a couple days ago for sounding like a broken record, stuck at the point of describing his Olympic nightmare, a story that sounded just as poignant and painful in every retelling. The fates conspired to overwhelm Zhou last month in Beijing, leaving him to deal with the sadness of missed opportunities while spending a week in COVID-19 quarantine. It was bad enough that a positive COVID-19 test forced him to withdraw from the singles competition after having helped the U.S. finish second to the Russian Olympic Committee in the team event. Then he lost the chance to celebrate the team medal in Beijing because the doping case involving Russian Kamila Valieva meant that medal presentation has been delayed until it is resolved, likely several months from now. Finally, there was insult added to injury: when Zhou tried to board the bus for the Closing Ceremony, where he hoped to find some redemptive joy in his Olympic experience, an official said he had been identified as a COVID-19 close contact and could not go. Three weeks later, waking up with the sense of being in what he called a “bottomless pit,” Zhou told his agent and coaches and others close to him that he felt his whole career has been a failure and for nothing. In that mental state, he was ready to drop out of the World Championships in Montpellier, France, until another emotion took over, the feeling of not wanting to live with the regret of not having tried. Somehow, Zhou pulled himself together to do more than just try, and he wound up skating well enough to win the bronze medal, a result that reminded the two-time Olympian not to lose faith in himself. |
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Post by Admin on Mar 28, 2022 12:55:23 GMT
“This is definitely one of the most significant and meaningful moments of my career,” said Zhou, 21, also a world bronze medalist in 2019.
With a sixth in Thursday’s short program and a fourth in Saturday’s free skate, Zhou finished third with 277.38 points to two Japanese skaters, Shoma Uno (312.48) and Yuma Kagiyama (297.60.)
“The most important lesson for me is no matter the difficulties thrown at you, you just have to keep moving forward,” Zhou said. “If you can’t move forward one step at a time, move forward half a step at a time.”
Zhou’s unexpected medal was not the only surprising result for the U.S. men.
Camden Pulkinen, who said immediately after finishing the free that his performance showed he could “contend for the top 10,” did far better, moving from 12th in the short program to fifth overall. Pulkinen was third in the free, where he had two solid quads in the first clean (no negative grades of execution) free skate of a seven-year international career.
It also was the only clean free among the top 20 men in Montpellier. It was good enough for Pulkinen to beat his old free skate and total personal bests by some 26 points, with scores of 182.19 and 271.69.
“I’m happy I gave myself a nice 22nd birthday present,” said Pulkinen, whose birthday was Friday.
Ilia Malinin, who dazzled the world in finishing second at January’s U.S. Championships, was in the thick of world medal contention after finishing fourth in the short. After opening the free with two lights-out quads, lutz and toe loop, and a big triple axel, he had a hard fall on a quad salchow and came undone, making two more major mistakes to finish 11th in the free and ninth overall.
“It was just a mess,” said Malinin, 17, the youngest in the men’s singles field. “It’s hard to explain what happened.”
Zhou’s mistakes included four jumps that were called short of the intended number of rotations. Solid grades of execution on his first two quads made back enough of the lost points to give him a margin of 5.35 over fourth finisher Morisi Kvitelashvili of Georgia, who needed very generous scores to stay .34 ahead of Pulkinen.
“Obviously, I’m a little disappointed in the mistakes, but as I said after the short program, it’s a miracle for me even being here,” Zhou said.
It would be nice if this medal allowed him to wipe the 2022 Olympics from his memory. It would also be unrealistic. The record may no longer be stuck, but the scratch that caused it to play on a maddening loop still is there.
“The grief of losing my opportunity at the Olympics is something that will stay with me a long time,” Zhou said. “Dealing with mental or emotional trauma like that, for lack of a better word, sometimes takes month and years.
“I’m sure there will be some difficult times for me ahead, where I still have to process the feelings related to what happened at the Olympics.”
“But the decision to come here and compete and walking away with a medal will help me a lot and reinforce my faith in myself,” Zhou said. “There is a lot more deep within me than I think is possible at times.”
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