OlderMirai Nagasu Reflects on Her Olympic Figure Skating Journey
Mirai Nagasu is getting candid with fans about her Olympic figure skating journey as she kicks off the new year.
The figure skater took to Instagram on Saturday (January 5) to reflect.
PHOTOS: Check out the latest pics of Mirai Nagasu
“In 2014, I was left off the Olympic team which was a decision that left me devastated and heartbroken,” she captioned the slideshow below. “I found myself in a place of anger, confusion, and most terrifyingly, self-deprecation.”
“In making the decision to continue to compete, I decided that I was going to give my career the effort that I thought I needed to to make another team and then some, which to me, at the time, meant learning a new jump,” she continued. “I wanted to become a skater to whom the selection committee couldn’t say no.”
“In 2016, I started to experience excruciating pains in my hip that reached all the way down my leg that at one point, didn’t allow me to straighten my knee,” she wrote. “As an athlete in a sport that takes constant falls, pain isn’t an abnormality, so I thought that the pain would eventually go away. It did not and eventually, I found out that I had torn my labrum and had fractured part of my hip socket in the process of learning the triple axel. In that year, I was given two options: get surgery to repair it or try PRP. I was told that there was a high chance that I could repair my labrum with PRP if enough scar tissue would form in the socket.”
Click inside to hear what else she had to say…
“As a skater with Eastern origins, surgery was not something that I could commit to quickly,” she shared. “Because I had also never undergone surgery, my team wasn’t sure how long it would take me to recover so I eventually decided to maintain and keep a close eye on my injury. I also made this decision based on the fact that the more time I took off, the more time I was going to need to get back into fighting shape and I felt like I needed all the competitions I could have on my resume.
I knew that making the Olympic team wasn’t going to be a trip of cotton candy and sprinkles but on some days, the pain and pressure were excruciatingly overwhelming. It also wasn’t something that I could easily share with anyone outside of my team because I saw this injury as a weakness. More importantly, I didn’t want the media to use it as an excuse as to why I didn’t compete well that day or a reason to leave me off the team again. #mythoughts #thoughts #thejourney #figureskating.”
“In 2018, I accomplished what I set out to do,” she added in another post. “I pushed myself past my own boundaries and became the first American female to land the 3A at the @olympics. In 2019, I promise to be nicer to myself and to my body. Here’s to making it through another year. 🏆 #athleticlifestyle”
