MILAN - After decades of practice and competition, American skaters Ellie Kam and Danny O'Shea were finally on Olympic ice Friday, floating and twisting in perfect harmony in the team pair short program. Then it happened. Faster than you can snap your fingers, Kam fell with a bump.
"We wish we were perfect every single time we step out on the ice," the 21-year-old Kam said after the performance with a melancholy smile. "But you know, ice is slippery."
What's fascinating about Kam and O'Shea's performance in Milan isn't that they stumbled. No amount of work or training can remove every variable every time. The history of Olympic figure skating is shaped almost as much by epic falls as by soaring pirouettes.
What's remarkable is how fast they recovered. In another snap of the fingers, with k.d. Lang's version of "Hallelujah" as their soundtrack, Kam leapt back off the hard ice, spinning into rhythm with O'Shea.
"(Kam) didn't need me to pick her up. She got up and went after the next thing," said O'Shea, who's 34. "We put the past in the past, and stepped right into the next element."
How do skaters do it? How do they find grace in the moments after the physical and emotional punishment of an Olympic fall?
"I mean it's a lot of practice, for sure," Kam said. "We focus [in training], so that if something does go wrong in competition, we don't have to question anything. I'm going to be where he is."
There's also communication: "We definitely look at each other," O'Shea said. "I do a lot of talking throughout our program. In that moment, it's a deep breath. It's like, all right, calm, one more thing, spin."
"We just fell down, it's very strange"
They weren't the only ones to hit the ice on Friday. China's Sui Wenjing and Han Cong won a gold medal in pairs figure skating at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
But during their team pair skating program, Sui Wenjing landed hard after flipping through the air.
"We fell down this time," Han Cong said. "We've skated well recently, but we just fell down, it's very strange. We have time now to prepare for the next [event]." Nodding confidently, Sui Wenjing said, "We should get more time to practice and recover from jet lag."
Sometimes, bouncing back from that kind of stumble can lead to triumph.
After the crash: Olympic triumph
At the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, China's Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao attempted a technical, risky throw that at the time had never been landed in a major international competition. It didn't work.
Zhang Dan landed hard, falling into an awkward splits. She left the ice with an injured knee while Zhang Hou held her up. Remarkably, the pair returned to the ice a short time later and went on to win a silver medal.
"When the music started again we didn't know where to start our elements, but we gave a gesture and then we carried on," said Zhang Dan, then 20 years old, to the China.org news service. "Gradually, after we restarted we became more and more clear in our minds how to do these elements. We wanted to go on."
In 2018, American Nathan Chen pulled off a similar recovery. After falling repeatedly at the Winter Games in South Korea, he made Olympic history by being the first skater to nail six quadruple jumps in a single free skate program.
"I was like, I already fell so many times, I might as well go out and throw everything down and see what happens," Chen, the two-time Olympic gold medal winner, told NPR at the time. "Screw it, I have nothing to lose."
The goal, of course, is to avoid falls of that magnitude and recover with as little drama as possible.
"I was like, whoopsies!" - Alysa Liu, age 20, speaking after her first outing at the Milan Cortina Winter Games
During Friday's team women's single skating competition in Milan, American Alysa Liu, age 20, did just that. She could be seen grimacing after making a small error during her performance, landing awkwardly off a spinning double axel.
"I was like, whoopsies!" Liu said, laughing. "My landing was really forward, right?" She said she felt confident in her routine and was able to quickly recover, sticking the landings on her next jumps confidently. "It's all good, right?"
Liu finished strong, capturing second place for her portion of the team event, while helping lift the U.S. team into first place for the overall team skating competition that continues through Sunday.
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