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Nagasu's Got Rhythm and the Lead
Mirai Nagasu earned 70.23 points Thursday in her first major senior competition.
(Eric Miller - Reuters)
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"It was so much fun," said Nagasu, last year's U.S. junior champion. "It was really exciting. The crowd got really into it. Like, it was just fun out there."
Wagner, too, had fun--after conquering her own nerves. She skated 18th of 20 skaters, a difficult position given the background noise that accompanied her pre-competition preparation.
"I'm really pleased with my performance," she said. "One thing that's always hard is backstage you can hear everything. It's really intimidating when you hear the crowd go wild . . . You need to focus on your own performance and not worry about anybody else."
Wagner did that, hitting only the second triple-triple of her competitive life. Nagasu could top that: Thursday's triple-triple, she said, was her first.
Meissner, meantime, fell attempting her first jump, a triple flip, but recovered coolly and reeled off an otherwise solid but safe program. She hit a nice triple Lutz-double toe combination -- electing not to try the triple-triple -- and then nailed a double Axel. Her marks reflected the ups and downs of the program; the 57.58 points represented her second-lowest mark in the short program of what has been a difficult season.
Meissner has been struggling to live up to the expectations heaped upon her when she won gold at the world championships in 2006. At the December Grand Prix Final in Turin, Italy, she collapsed in the deciding free skate, falling on three jump attempts. She finished sixth out of six skaters as U.S. teammate Caroline Zhang, 14. who finished seventh here, claimed fourth place.
"I want to come back after the Grand Prix Final," Meissner said. "I don't even want to think about that. It was just a bad day."
Little-known Katrina Hacker, a 17-year-old who trains in Boston and attends Manhattan Professional Children's School, finished fifth with 56.87. Hacker was the least acclaimed of the top skaters, failing to even get a mention in the U.S. Figure Skating Association's media guide.
