Her choice of music is no accident: Bradie Tennell is on a personal mission of trying to make another Olympic team

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Her choice of music is no accident: Bradie Tennell is on a personal mission of trying to make another Olympic team

The story of Bradie Tennell’s long and decorated figure skating career has a satirically cartoonish side to it, which is something she wryly acknowledges, no matter that it has hurt like heck at times to be its protagonist.

“I have definitely felt a bit like Eeyore,” Tennell said, recalling the donkey in A.A. Milne’s Pooh stories with a perpetually aggrieved and ironically comedic view of his plight.

“They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them,” Eeyore says in The House at Pooh Corner.

How true that has been for Tennell, 27, who makes her Grand Prix season debut this weekend at Skate Canada in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. For the last five seasons, it has been one thing after another for the two-time U.S. champion and 2018 Olympic team event bronze medalist.

Injuries. Boot problems. More injuries. Blade issues. Tennell kept trying to avoid having the other boot drop, because it usually hit her leg. Whether her travails were purely accidental or just the damage elite athletes incidentally do to their bodies and equipment, she had them all while trying to make another Olympic team.

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In memoir, skating champion Nicole Bobek confronts her past head-on, frightening details and all

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In memoir, skating champion Nicole Bobek confronts her past head-on, frightening details and all

 It's wild how fast life can flip. On minute, you’re center ice with the world at your feet. . .The next you're barefoot in a Florida jail cell shaking so hard you can't even hold the phone steady enough to dial your mom, let alone speak when she answers.

--Nicole Bobek in her new memoir, “Bobek: The Wild One”

 I texted Nicole Bobek last month to let her know I had received the review copy of her book.  She replied, “You might wanna put on your seatbelt for this one.”

Indeed.  As the except quoted above (and several to follow) illustrates, the figure skating champion’s life (lives?) has been a bumpy ride, with more than one crash landing.

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Liu finds the joy — and the lead — at World Figure Skating Championships

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Liu finds the joy — and the lead — at World Figure Skating Championships

BOSTON – In her first figure skating career, the one she ended with a retirement three years ago at age 16, Alysa Liu won national titles, made history as the youngest this and the youngest that, did landmark jumps for a U.S. woman, competed in the Olympics and won a world championships bronze medal.

The way Liu describes all that now, it was a pretty joyless experience.

She didn’t like to practice. That meant she rarely went into a competition as prepared as she needed to be. That — and injuries — made her performances erratic.

“It was a job,” she said.

Her unexpected return this season, on her own terms, has been so enjoyable that Liu literally turned a cartwheel on the entry walkway before taking the ice for Wednesday afternoon’s short program at the 2025 World Championships.

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A new Alysa Liu steps back into spotlight with stunning short program at figure skating nationals

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A new Alysa Liu steps back into spotlight with stunning short program at figure skating nationals

WICHITA, Kansas – When Alysa Liu called her former coach, Phillip DiGuglielmo, about a year ago to say that she wanted to return to competitive skating, he tried to talk her out of it.

He tried so hard that one glass of wine led to another, until DiGuglielmo had put down a whole bottle in a vain two-hour effort to convince her by enumerating all the reasons why coming back would be tortuous, maybe even torturous — and certainly a bad idea.

What he didn’t know then was how much Liu had changed in the time since she had announced her retirement at the end of the 2022 season, when she was plainly sick of skating.

“I wouldn’t ask any elite athlete to take two years off of skating,” DiGuglielmo said Thursday night, after Liu won the short program at the Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships, “but maybe that was what made her this good, because she had time to mature.”

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Sarah Everhardt goes from scene stealer to spotlight at U.S. Figure Skating Champs

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Sarah Everhardt goes from scene stealer to spotlight at U.S. Figure Skating Champs

Sarah Everhardt’s expected role at last year’s Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships seemed to be like that of an extra on a movie set, there to fill out a scene … or, in this case, the field for a competition.

After all, it was Everhardt’s national debut at the senior level, and she had finished 13th and 11th at the junior level the previous seasons, and her results leading up to the 2024 event were unremarkable.

So who could have foreseen Everhardt turning into a bit of a scene stealer as she finished fourth overall and third in the free skate? She did it with two clean programs (no negative grades of execution) for the first time in her career, according to skatingscores.com.

“I know I have it in me,” Everhardt said via Zoom. “When I go to a competition, I know that I’m capable of skating clean, doing my best. So I always just try to use that confidence going in.”

After a solid international season this fall, with a first and second in two Challenger Series events, Everhardt goes into this week’s nationals in Wichita, Kansas as one of a half-dozen medal contenders in a competition that became even more wide open when reigning world silver medalist Isabeau Levito withdrew last week with a foot injury.

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