MILAN — Amber Glenn bailed and Alysa Liu gasped. Liu could talk for hours about Glenn—Liu could talk for hours about anything—but at that moment, in the media mixed zone at Milano MSK Competition rink, a gasp was worth a thousand words. Liu was watching her teammate on TV. Glenn was supposed to do a triple loop and didn’t. Invalid element. Farewell, gold medal dreams.
Figure skating is elegant and powerful, beautiful and precise, but mostly, on the Olympic level, it is tense. There is nothing quite like it in sports. The difference between extraordinary success and crushing disappointment is literally as thin as the blade of a skate—and when a program suddenly collapses, as Glenn’s did, skaters have zero seconds to shake it off. They must keep going.
