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Skater calm under pressure
Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Jan 12, 2001 by Kamon Simpson
He had every reason to be nervous. He was skating for the first time at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships as a senior, and found himself a surprising sixth after his short program.
Then came the final, the long program, and Ryan Bradley's timing couldn't have been much worse. Last to skate, immediately following Timothy Goebel, the hometown favorite there in Cleveland. Thousands were hanging around Gund Arena just to watch Goebel's famous quad. He'd be an impossible act to follow.
"I told him, 'You're going to have to skate after Tim. He's going to skate well, and he's going to have the crowd on his side, and you have to be prepared,'" said Bradley's coach, Tom Zakrajsek.
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"I looked over at Ryan about halfway through Tim's routine, and I could see this look on his face, like he was losing it because he was so nervous."
Zakrajsek was worried. Watching Bradley skate onto the ice that was being bombarded by flowers and stuffed animals for Goebel, he might have envisioned a complete collapse, missed jumps, falls, the kind of performance that would wreck a young skater's confidence for a long time.
But something remarkable happened.
Bradley started skating completely loose, improvising his routine set to a Hungarian dance tune, ad libbing in parts, winking at friends he spotted sitting in the front rows, hamming it up, engaging a crowd that should have been emotionally spent.
Remarkably, he was stealing the show. The crowd started clapping along to his routine. And although Zakrajsek thought the resulting performance was, "a little too much, that he was going overboard out there," and the judges reaction was mixed, giving him a score that left him in seventh place overall, Bradley proved something to himself, to his coach, and to the figure skating community.
He belonged.
"Whenever I'd compete at the lower levels, I'd always screw around," Bradley said. "I'd talk to my buddies in the corner as I went around the ice, or I'd do something stupid for my personal enjoyment, take some risks, just to have fun."
Bradley, a Colorado Springs native who skates for the Broadmoor Club, is back at his second U.S. Figure Skating Championships next week in Boston, and unlike last year, when he was 16 and the next- youngest skater was 19, he's no longer the young pup.
He brings experience and confidence into this year's competition, even if it has been tougher to prepare this time around. A stress fracture in his right knee - "My landing leg, how convenient," he quipped - and a recent flu have hampered his training.
"Ironically, he's competed better with his injury than he ever has," Zakrajsek said. "It's like if he doesn't do well, he knows the reason why. That's taken a lot of the pressure off him, allowing him to relax."
Not that Bradley is a victim of pressure. He proved that last year.
Copyright 2001
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