Ashley Wagner starting 2016-17 season on top of her game
HOFFMAN ESTATES, Ill. — All it took was one question, the very first question in the very first news conference of the new figure skating season, for reigning world silver medalist Ashley Wagner to start talking about the Olympic Games.
Not Sochi. Not Rio.
PyeongChang.
“That’s the whole reason why I’m skating,” the 25-year-old Wagner said Friday evening. “The Olympic podium is definitely my goal at this point.”
Wagner, the three-time U.S. national champion who is one of the very rare women's skaters to get better with age, knows that the 2016-17 season is the warm-up act to what matters most: the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, which, hard to believe, are less than 16 months away.
Wagner picked up at Skate America on Friday night right where she left off at the world championships in Boston last spring, winning the short program without a big mistake while U.S. teammate and rival Gracie Gold fell once and was nearly five points behind in third place.
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“It was a pretty hard summer,” said Gold, 21, who wilted on the international stage in Boston and dropped from first place after the short program to fourth overall. “I felt like I let people down. No one felt the intense shame I felt.”
These two were the top American skaters in Sochi — Gold finishing fourth and Wagner seventh — and they are very likely to be the top two going into PyeongChang as well. Skating being a slippery sport, there’s no way to know where they’ll be a day from now, much less in a year or so.
But as of Friday night, one was clearly gazing backward, trying to deal with the still-raw memories of an opportunity lost, while the other was riding a wave of tremendous confidence into a season of endless possibility.
How is Wagner pulling this off at an age when most female skaters have long since retired?
“I was very lucky in that I came up at a time where I was kind of overshadowed,” she said, referring to young talents such as Mirai Nagasu. “They took the spotlight when I was coming up so I didn’t have the American media swallowing me whole at a young age. That kind of gave me a little bit of longevity. I didn’t get burned out at a young age. Beyond that, knock on wood, I’ve stayed pretty injury free. I feel like a very young 25.”
Wagner is well known as the one Olympic athlete who consistently spoke out against Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay propaganda law heading into the 2014 Sochi Games, and just last week, she called Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “absolutely disgusting.”
“I am always true to who I am,” she said. “This is the person that I am. What you see is what you get. I make no apologies for it. If you don’t like it, that’s okay, it doesn’t hurt my feelings. Skating is definitely a sport where it can become very manicured. I’ve been very aware of that throughout the years. I don’t want to become that kind of an athlete. I want to continue to just be true to myself.”
Off the ice, and now, on it.