A MIRAI NAGASU PRIMER
This is Mirai Nagasu, figure skater. You may know her!
Mirai, whose name means "future" in Japanese, just turned 17 this March. She's the 2008 US national champion -- yes, she won that title when she was 14 -- and the 2007 US national junior champion. Youngest lady since Tara Lipinski to win the US senior ladies title, and first lady since Joan Tozzer to win the junior and senior national titles in consecutive years, etc. SHE'S BASICALLY AMAZING.
Believe it or not, Mirai used to be even tinier!
She started skating when she was five -- like, her dad wanted her to be a golfer, and she did that for a while. One day, though, it was raining so they took her skating instead.
And in her mind, she had minimal natural talent in skating. "I think the fact that I was really bad at ice skating made me want to stick with it and get better at it. I would keep tripping and falling and I couldn't glide at first," she recalls. But Mirai has a stubborn, competitive streak that was evident even as a five-year-old. "I used to skate with my mom and she had skating experience, so she would always try to make me race her," she says. "I would always be the slower one so over time I just kept working harder and harder until I finally was able to pass her." Now, Mirai considers speed as the factor that sets her skating apart from everyone else. source
MORE ABOUT HER
Mirai is known for being outspoken and funny. I’m just going to show you these videos:
Best moments from the pre-Olympics press conference!
Click to view"I'm just excited about all of the free stuff we're going to get. I hope a medal will come so... I guess I can be stereotypical and say that Asians are very cheap... It's just Rachael and me, and we're just going to blow them away. Bang. Bang. Bang."
Mirai’s Olympic Experience vid -- she put it together herself!
AHHH MOST PRECIOUSEST.
Here is where I just give up attempting to describe her and spam you with quotes. She is by turns:
PLAYFUL:
- Nagasu filled some of the entertainment gap with the mix of witticisms, wisdom, wacky observations about herself and her experiences, and the often self-critical honesty that already have made her a one-woman media show.
... And so it went, with Nagasu deadpanning that the change she has made in her free skate routine since nationals was to add a quadruple jump, then following it with a perfectly timed, "Just kidding."
- The coach said that, even as she noted how Nagasu is in the stage of teenage willfulness and willingness that can be charming and maddening to adults.
"Mirai is full of mischief, stubborn and determined to get what she wants," Wong said.
Nagasu defied her mother's insistence on healthy eating by stuffing herself with chocolate chip cookies when no one was looking this week, then insisted to Wong she hadn't eaten any despite the crumbs on her face. source
- Mirai Nagasu is not easy on herself, even if she swears most of what she says is not meant in a "self-deprecatory way" but comes from a sarcastic sense of humor that leaves her words open to misinterpretation.
EMPATHETIC:
- "Being the heavy favorite is not always the good thing," Nagasu said. "It's the Olympics, so the whole world is watching.
"Hopefully, I will be able to just stand next to Yuna, and while she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, I will just be holding it up with a finger."
HONEST:
- Nagasu also acknowledged that she's concerned that former U.S. champion and 2006 Olympic silver medalist Sasha Cohen has returned to Olympic-track competition at the age of nearly 25. Cohen's return should create plenty of drama when the U.S. Olympic delegation is chosen after the U.S. championships in Spokane, Wash., in January because the U.S. can send only two women to the Vancouver Games. Nagasu on today shared the spotlight with several other likely contenders: defending U.S. champion Alissa Czisny, Ashley Wagner, Rachael Flatt and Caroline Zhang of Brea. Each said they welcomed the competition that Cohen would provide; Nagasu took an opposite tack.
"It's a little intimidating that the Olympic silver medalist is coming back," she said. "She just has that edge over us. Hopefully I'll use my experience this past year to help me out -- and my youth."source
SELF-CRITICAL:
- For all that, her answers remain blunt. Asked to describe herself, Nagasu replied, "Talented but lazy."
- "There are always moments when I think about leaving skating, but when I think about that I'm not very smart and I'm not very pretty and there's nothing else that stands out about me besides my skating," she said, though she certainly comes across as bright and funny and is unquestionably attractive.
"So it's like the love of my life. It's like loving someone. You want to break up sometimes but if you get past those hardships everything will come together." source
IMAGINATIVE:
- “I have my own fantasy world in my head,” she said. “When things were difficult, I would put myself in that and go through my whole day that way. It was someone else doing all those things. Someone else making the jumps, someone else being spoken to. I lived inside books, inside a different world. In my head. Not a different world [but] somewhere else.” source
- Nagasu told reporters in 2009 that she had a dark side - and it was a least partially responsible for her poor performances. “I was thinking more about Star Wars and Darth Vadar was a good person but he turned over to the evil side,” Nagasu told the Orange County Register. source
LOVING:
- “The economy made things difficult for my parents financially, and they have given up a lot to help me try to become an Olympian,” Mirai Nagasu said. “It made me sad to think that they might not be able to come to Vancouver because they would have to keep the restaurant open.
“The fact that I am becoming the first Olympian in my family is a reward for my parents for all their sacrifices. I don’t like to cry, but if I had looked up at the stands and they were not there, it could have made me feel like it.”source
(All the uncredited quotes from this section come from this Los Angeles Times article.)
FAMILY
Mirai's parents are first-generation Japanese immigrants to the US, and Mirai has dual citizenship. She has to pick by the time she turns 22, though, Japan doesn't allow dual citizenship beyond that age. There are rumours that she's been approached about competing for Japan.
She's an only child. Her parents have a sushi restaurant known as Kiyosuzu in Arcadia, California. According to Mirai, it's "as good as the restaurants at Beverly Hills". Because her parents could not afford a babysitter, Mirai would go from school to the restaurant, where she’d do her homework and sleep on a cot in the backroom until it was time to close. Now she attends high school online, though, and stays at home by herself. She has a Chihuahua dog to keep her company!
Due to the recession, the Nagasus have been struggling financially, and Mirai's only been able to continue skating due to a combination of thrift (her mum wears clothes with holes in, Mirai doesn't know what size she wears because all her clothes are secondhand) and financial help -- she's got a skating scholarship from the Michael Weiss Foundation.
“Mirai looks like me?” he said when a customer at Kiyosuzu sushi restaurant comments on the facial resemblance between the owner and his daughter. “Phew, that’s good.”
The joke wasn’t particularly funny, and it was lost on some of the hungry patrons huddled around the cozy fish bar in Arcadia, Calif., on a rainy night two weeks before the Winter Olympics. They cut him some slack, though. After all, this was a man who had kept them entertained with a steady stream of witticisms for the past hour, all while preparing copious amounts of octopus, eel, sea bass, and other delights.
Spend an evening in Kiyosuzu and it’s not hard to see how 16-year-old Mirai Nagasu has evolved into the delightfully quirky personality that could make her a cult star when the women’s figure skating program begins at the Vancouver Winter Olympics on Tuesday night. Much of it surely comes from her dad. source
Her mother is also incredibly amazing. She was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in the fall of 2009 (just as Mirai began the skating season) and has undergone successful treatment.
Ikuko Nagasu was diagnosed in October. "Those first days were really tough," Mirai Nagasu said. Her mother underwent her first surgery in late October as Mirai was preparing for her first ISU Grand Prix competition of the 2009-10 season, the Cup of China in Beijing. source
The first day she was out of the hospital, Mirai's mother wanted to drive her to the ice rink. So yeah, pretty awesome.
COMPETITION & TRAINING
Mirai's Biellman spin. Notable because of how she clasps her boot instead of the skate blade, which most skaters hold onto.
Mirai's an incredibly lyrical and artistic skater who is known for her spins. However, she has been penalised for underrotating her jumps. Speaking off the top of my head here -- I think the ISU has introduced rule changes to give underrotated triple jumps more credit rather than merely treating them as doubles, and if I am not wrong this is known as the Asada Rule, because of a certain Japanese skater that benefits from this. Well, Mirai will probably gain more points as a result too -- which, :D!!
Because NBC is a dick, I can't find her Olympics programs on Youtube. But have her 2010 programs at various other places --
Short program at the 2010 worlds! It made her the leader after the short program. She skates to Pirates of the Carribean:
Fuck she is adorable.
2010 long program at the Nationals! This one is Carmen:
Like I've mentioned before, she won the US Nationals at the age of 14 in 2008, making her the youngest senior ladies champion since Tara Lipinski. Here she is looking tiny (she was only 4 ft 9 then, and had a growth spurt in 2009 -- another thing she struggled over that season, causing her to have to relearn her jumps -- so now she's 5 ft 2. TINY TINY TINY) on that goddamn podium:
Or another one:
This season she was second in the Nationals to Rachael Flatt, earning her one of two spots on the Olympics team (where she legendarily said, "I'm looking forward to the Olympics for the free swag"), and at Vancouver she placed fourth. At Worlds she had a semi-meltdown and placed seventh, which was... disappointing.
(During her short program at the Olympics, she spun so hard that she got a bloody nose. Well, part of it was the drier Vancouver air. BUT MY POINT IS. She was sixth after the short program anyway! And rallied to become fourth overall.
Bloody nose picture!)
This brings us to another aspect of Mirai-the-skater -- she can be emotional and somewhat headcasey, thus leading to inconsistent performances. She's also relatively stubborn (insisting on competing through a foot injury in the 2009 season despite her ex-coach Charlene Wong urging her to rest), has problems with authority etc. Comparisons to Johnny Weir are valid, I think. Her most recent meltdown was at Worlds, where she finished seventh despite leading after the short program (she was leading! Scoring higher than Mao Asada or Kim Yu-Na!)
This is a pretty good article on Mirai's problems with skating under pressure, and also contains the priceless quote (oh, what am I talking about here, it's MIRAI, all things to do with her are priceless):
''Sorry,'' Nagasu said to Carroll after coming off the ice. An hour later, she was trying to talk a U.S. figure skating official into going for ice cream at a nearby mall.
She seems to be working with a coach who'll fix that, though. After the 2009 season where she finished fifth at Nationals -- coming from her 2008 win, that's pretty bad -- she left Charlene Wong, who'd coached her for three years before that, to go to Frank Carroll. That's right! Her and Evan Lysacek are training partners!
Is this not the best picture of her ever? Her little face! (I'm pretty sure this was taken before her long program at the Olympics.) In general I find the interactions between her and Frank incredibly charming -- like, he's all gruff and stern and she's incredibly perky and excitable.
He tells her to smile and she does so, to devastating effect!
Carroll now enforces a “no crying” rule at the Toyota Sports Center, where she trains, and at her competitions, following Nagasu’s breakdowns at the rink . “I told her, one more tear, and she could pack up her skates, take her CDs and walk out that door,” he said. source
It might seem pretty harsh, but as far as I can tell Frank does seem to provide a lot of the tough love and discipline Mirai needs.
OTHER SKATERS
Mirai's, like, the little sister of the skating community! Everyone loves her, because how could they not. This year, she went on Stars On Ice with a whole bunch of other skaters and celebrated her birthday then:
Meryl wants her to have a good birthday! Holy shit, she's only 17.
Jeremy Abbott, on the other hand, tweeted her asking her to keep it down:
She has so many shenanigans with Jeremy Abbott! This includes editing Jeremy's Wikipedia page --
more details here -- and getting her hair cut with him.
(Incidentally, her Twitter is hilarious! Lol agony aunt column.)
Other ppl of note include:
Caroline Zhang
Back in 2007, when Caroline Zhang was a bigger name in skating, they were pretty close. Tiny BFFs! Here is a picture of them together --
and this interview is the most adorable thing ever. Knowing looks!
(Also remarkable for containing Caroline Zhang's Pearl spin. Wtf how is it possible to do these things to your body?)
This is after she won the 2007 US National Junior Ladies championship. They were pretty joined at the hip -- they met once a week on Sundays! I'm pretty sure there's a story you should be writing about that.
Rachael Flatt
Recently, however, she's been garnering comparisons to Rachael Flatt, which I guess is not surprising because they're two of the greatest names in US ladies' figure skating right now. The artist/athlete dichotomy seems to come up a lot in articles -- Rachel's supposedly the athlete, and Mirai's the artist:
"One of the very first things I said to [Flatt] and her mom, I said, 'Get the image of being a tiny little bird out of your head,"' Hamill said. "'You are an amazing athlete and you can't wish and hope and pray for something you don't have.' She has to make herself the best artist and athlete she can be.
"I wanted to be Janet Lynn," Hamill said, referring to the angelic icon of her generation. "I knew I couldn't be Peggy Fleming, so I didn't even go there. Rachael's never going to be able to do a vertical spiral, and some of the other girls are never going to be able to do a triple-triple [jump]." source
Mirai does an arabesque spiral.
Thankfully though, they seem to be keeping it classy. Mirai refer to Rachael as a teammate rather than a competitor a lot, something made easier by the fact that going into the Olympics they were both underdogs in a scene dominated by Kim Yu-Na, Mao Asada etc, and that there was tremendous pressure on the both of them since US female skaters have always (or, for at least forty years) medalled in every Olympics. Here's what Mirai had to say about that:
"Bring it on," Nagasu said.
..."It's just Rachael and me, and we're just going to blow them away," Nagasu insisted, mixing the insouciance of youth with a motor mouth that thankfully has no governor.
Rachael, who seems to have the benefit of being a year older and also having a steadier and more temperate personality, said this:
"We need to embrace the challenge, and I'm sure we're both up for it," Flatt said. "We're young and spirited."
... The steadiness of Flatt's skating the last two years, as clearly evidenced by her winning nationals with two clean programs, may put her in a position to claim a medal if one or more of the Big Three falters. Flatt beat Kim in the long program at Skate America in November when the South Korean fell on a jump.
"My consistency bodes well for me," Flatt said.
source
I'm pretty sure you should be shipping them. It's like Johnny Weir and Evan Lysacek! Only they're girls! And they get along!
Evan Lysacek
They have the same coach and are in fact training partners! Mirai had some driving lessons from Evan over the summer (source), and here Evan talks about Mirai's skating:
Nagasu trains with 2009 World Champion Evan Lysacek. “Training with Evan motivates me to accomplish my goals. Sometimes I am very lazy but then I watch him in practice, and I want to train harder,” Nagasu said.
... “I think that she has something special that few people have. She has that ‘it’ factor,” Lysacek said about Nagasu. “Since she’s came to train with Frank, I have seen tremendous improvements in her skating, and she has the potential to do so much more. I think she really could be a great champion. She has everything she needs.” source
&
"If Frank told me to do a triple lutz-triple loop, I would work on it and work on it for six months before getting it," Lysacek said. "Mirai can do it on the first try, but then can't do it in a competition. She needs to get tougher mentally." source
In conclusion,
if there was a show entitled "Everybody Loves Mirai", I would watch it. -- oh, wait, real life!
THE END. I hope this makes sense! For a more chronologically organised version of Mirai’s growth spurt/coaching change/career over 2008/9, which I didn’t really detail, look here.