Nagasu's Got Rhythm and the Lead
14-Year-Old Wows U.S. Championships With Lively Routine

By Amy Shipley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn., Jan. 24 -- Mirai Nagasu wore her long black hair in a ponytail and skated in a shiny pink leotard with big white flowers all over it. She smiled a lot. Just 14, she is a ninth grader in Arcadia, Calif. She dropped her chin when she saw her scores in the short program Thursday at the U.S. figure skating championships, and the first thing she did when she left the ice was try to call her mother on her cellphone.

And it was about then that someone informed Nagasu she wasn't merely in first place, she held an unfathomably commanding lead over the defending U.S. champion: She had topped Kimmie Meissner by more than 12 points.

"It's 12 points?" she said in disbelief, breaking into a huge grin. "Wow! That's exciting!"

Yes, it was. Nagasu was the youngest and least experienced of a flock of youngsters who descended with huge hopes upon these championships, causing Meissner, a former world champion from Bel Air, Md., who is 18, to beg not to be described as "old." (She said she preferred the word "mature.")

Yet it was Nagasu who made the biggest competitive leap, executing a program of extraordinary difficulty while absolutely charming the crowd and wowing the judges at Xcel Center with every one of her 4 feet 11 inches and lively dancing to "I Got Rhythm."

By night's end, Nagasu's 70.23 points not only put her at the top of the standings, but they also represented the second-highest total ever accrued by a U.S. woman in a short program since the new scoring system was instituted after the 2002 Winter Games. Meissner, meantime, fell attempting a triple flip and put forward a less complex program than Nagasu, which left her with 57.58 points -- good enough only for fourth place with the deciding long program scheduled for Saturday night.

In second place? Ashley Wagner, 16, an Army brat who moved nine times in 15 years but has resided in Alexandria since late 2001. Wagner, among the last skaters of the night, hit a clean triple Lutz-triple loop combination and skated a strong and professional program that, perhaps, lacked the energy of Nagasu's. Wagner, who is coached by Shirley Hughes, earned 65.15 points. Rachael Flatt, 15, stood in third place (62.91) after a near-flawless program that included a triple Lutz-triple toe combination.

If the results were to stand up Saturday, the only skater among the top three old enough to attend the March senior world championships in Sweden would be Wagner.

"It's great to see," Meissner said, before falling out of the first-place position she briefly held. "U.S. skating has a lot of young skaters coming up to carry the sport."

On Thursday, Nagasu carried it with the most aplomb. She hit a triple Lutz-triple toe combination, triple flip and double Axel. She exuded energy, showed off complex spins and didn't so much as wobble throughout.

"I would have to say," her coach Charlene Wong said, "that's the best she's skated this season."

Nagasu, who often has nodded off on a cot at her parents' sushi restaurant during late nights there, said she struggled to sleep in her hotel room Wednesday night. This was, after all, her first major senior competition. Though she had swept the junior international events she had entered this season, including the Junior Grand Prix Final in December, she had never competed against the likes of Meissner.

"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.