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Post by Admin on Jan 20, 2015 21:21:07 GMT
Gracie Gold was on a roll this season, winning the NHK Trophy and qualifying for the Grand Prix Final, when her plans were sidelined by an unexpected injury. Gold was forced to withdraw from the Final when she discovered she had a small stress fracture on her foot. It was devastating for her, but weeks have gone by and she has now recovered and is preparing for the 2015 U.S. National Championships.
“I’m very happy to announce that I am am feeling strong, fully healthy going into the National Championships,” Gracie said in a teleconference on January 13, 2015. “I’m ready to lay down some great programs and take the title again.” Gold was unable to perform triple jumps for several weeks while dealing with her injury, forcing her to focus on other elements of her skating like transitions, spins, speed, flow and making an emotional connection to the music and the audience. “I think I am physically stronger than I was before the injury just because I’ve had a lot of time to work out since I wasn’t skating,” Gracie said. “When I came back it was really easy to get back to my old routine, all of the triples came back really quickly.”
“The rivalry with Ashley, I think it’s pushed us both to not just be better competitors, but better skaters in general,” Gracie said. “She’s one of my biggest competitors in the US. It’s been a non-hostile rivalry, but I think it’s just made us better. I was super jealous that she got to go to the Final while I had my foot injury, it just pushed me to train even harder leading into this nationals.” Gold’s injury has healed, yet she is still limited specifically on how many triple toe loops she can perform each day. Regardless, Gracie is confident that her triple lutz-triple toe combination will not be hindered due to the injury. “I won’t call it a blessing, but some good things came out of it,” she said.
Gracie won her first national title last year, which qualified her for both the Olympic Games and the World Championships, so this year she is coming in as the defending champion. “It feels different, not because I am a defending champion. Last year there was so much on the line not even related to winning a title, it determined the fate of who was going to the Olympics and who was going to the World Championships,” Gold explained. “This year it’s more low key and now it’s all about the title. So I feel like I am not defending anything, I’m just trying to win another one.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 23, 2015 21:05:10 GMT
As billed, it was the battle of the champions from the past three years at the 2015 Prudential U.S. Figure Skating Championships. And in the end, it was Ashley Wagner, the 2012 and 2013 champion, who took the lead with new difficulty in her short program. Defending champion Gracie Gold is in second, five points behind Wagner, after doubling the second half of her triple lutz-triple toe combination. It's a close race for the podium, with the four skaters behind Gold separated by three points. Defending silver medalist Polina Edmunds is in third after delivering her best short program of the season, with defending bronze medalist Mirai Nagasu in fourth. Ladies short (FINAL) 1. Ashley Wagner - 72.04 2. Gracie Gold - 67.02 3. Polina Edmunds - 66.04 4. Mirai Nagasu - 65.28 5. Courtney Hicks - 65.01 6. Karen Chen - 64.66 7. Amber Glenn - 63.04 8. Leah Keiser - 60.89 9. Tyler Pierce - 60.28 10. Hannah Miller - 59.81 11. Samantha Cesario - 59.21 12. Mariah Bell - 57.35 13. Caroline Zhang - 55.40 14. Ashley Cain - 54.35 15. Ashley Shin - 53.67 16. Franchesca Chiera - 52.91 17. Angela Wang - 51.02 18. Christina Gao - 50.78 19. Madison Vinci - 45.38 20. Katie McBeath - 45.36 21. Christina Cleveland - 45.24 22. Maria Yang - 42.79
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Post by Admin on Mar 13, 2015 20:58:25 GMT
One of my favorite on-the-go snacks! #Yum #BusyLife #SmuckersFruitFulls #Ad @smuckers All week we’ll be talking to our 2015 World Team before they head off to Shanghai for #WCShanghai and we want you participate! Submit your questions before and during the hangout using the hashtag #WhatsUpWorldTeam on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and your question could be asked LIVE! How do you watch? It will be streaming LIVE on our YouTube Channel but will also be embedded below! @maiashibutani I better bring my A-game tonight! I don't want to make @graceegold & @alexshibutani fall asleep again..
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Post by Admin on Mar 20, 2015 21:03:04 GMT
Gracie Gold did not realize that the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics would forever change her life until she landed back in Los Angeles. Riding the escalator down to the baggage claim at LAX, she noticed that many of the travelers were stopping and pointing at her. All of the sudden, the airport erupted into applause. Nothing less than a hero’s welcome for the Olympic figure skater who helped Team USA win a bronze medal in the team event. “People were so supportive,” Gold recalled. “I didn’t think I had done anything special—I was just skating.” Gold starred in a ubiquitous Nike commercial for cold-weather gear. She had the opportunity to experience a race day at the Indianapolis 500. She even the took a trip to Catalina Island with musical icons Taylor Swift and Lorde. “It’s been a whirlwind,” Gold said an interview prior to being honored as the Sportswoman of the Year at the LA Sports Awards. Through it all, Gold managed to maintain her focus on the ice. She had arguably her best international season in 2014-2015, winning her first ISU Grand Prix Series event at NHK Trophy in November. She also finished on the podium at Skate America. But in December, with a stress fracture in her left foot, Gold had to withdraw from the ISU Grand Prix Finals. “People were disappointed for me because I had a pretty strong Grand Prix season, and they wanted to see me skate,” Gold said. “But they knew I needed to rest up before U.S. Nationals and the World Championships.” With less than three weeks to train after returning to the ice, Gold relinquished her U.S. national championship title to her longtime rival, Ashley Wagner. “[Our rivalry] is not nearly as vicious as television makes it seem,” Gold said. “Ashley is tough as nails on the ice, but she is really nice off the ice. We all have a really good time together.” Gold and Wagner, along with Polina Edmunds, will next take the global stage at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships, which will be televised on Universal Sports. “The Word Championships are the closest thing you get to an Olympics,” Gold said. “The best of the best get to rival each other.”
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2015 20:21:40 GMT
Former U.S. figure skating champion Gracie Gold will spend her offseason learning new jumps — a triple Axel and quadruple Salchow, according to IceNetwork.com. “In two weeks, [coach] Frank [Carroll] and I are going to start working on triple Axel and quad [Salchow],” Gold said, according to the report. “It was our plan after Sochi to start working on it, but when we looked at the plate, with [the Stars on Ice] tour, we just never really had the chance. We were constantly trying to recover and catch up.” “Frank and I do want to work on a triple Axel, and we definitely would like to play around with — it seems silly when women talk about it — but a quad toe loop,” Gold told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. “Right now, unless we add in a second triple-triple (combination jump), I’m kind of reaching the technical limit, and that means we really have to enhance the artistic component.” Gold, 19, was the top U.S. woman at the Sochi Olympics (fourth), 2014 World Championships (fifth) and 2015 World Championships (fourth). No U.S. woman has won an individual medal at the Olympics or World Championships since 2006, the longest drought since World War I. Russian World champion Elizaveta Tuktamysheva is the only active elite woman performing a triple Axel in competition. No elites are doing quads in competition. Tuktamysheva said after winning Worlds last month that she may try to learn a quad toe loop but had no immediate plans of adding it to her competitive programs.
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