Ice skating short program for women live updates, results and analysis

BEIJING – Shortly after her twentieth birthday, Maria Bell wanted to make a difference Snowboarding Professional life. She graduated from high school a few years ago, so by this point, she felt ready – and had the time – to fully commit to her sport. She called Rafael Arutyunian, an elite coach in California, ready to jump into a new training environment that would help her reach far greater heights than she had ever achieved.

The only problem? Arutyunyan says he won’t answer the phone.

“There is no reason,” he remembers thinking. As he assumed Bell probably wouldn’t have more than a few years left in her skating career, he didn’t think he could help much in that short period. But she called again, and then asked to meet her face to face when she was in town for a contest – insisting that he be compared to a monk sitting in the air and snow outside a Mukhtar monastery.

“They can sit for months and months and months,” Arutyunian said. They say: No, we want [to be] here. We want this. We do not want the other. this [how] You convinced me to take it.”

Bell remembers “kind of feeling like I wouldn’t take a no,” because she wholeheartedly believed she could move forward in the sport. After starting with Arutyunyan, she won the US Nationals bronze the following year, and made her world championship team debut. She gradually rose to the top of women’s figure skating in the United States, but entered her ninth season as a top figure skater, and Bell had no national titles, world championship medals, or Olympic pavements.

And then, at last, last month, I reached that climax, Winning national championships To secure a place on this Olympic team. And in doing so, she became the largest female figure skater in the United States at the Games in nearly a century. Bell doesn’t focus on her age, but she doesn’t care about her title as the 25-year-old Olympian because it is hoped, she said, that it will allow others to believe they can make it here — even as a teenager, especially from Russia, to continue to dominate the podiums. .