On the morning of the day he has been working for his entire life, Zhou feels good. He has been in Beijing for more than a week and is ready to fight for a medal.
He competed in the team event. He told his coach that he felt a bit tired, but he kept Team USA in the silver medal position.
The 21-year-old is getting ready to go to practice, where he will skate alongside the men who will be his rivals for the podium: six-time U.S. champion Nathan Chen, two-time Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu, and 2018? His phone goes off. Something is not right.
He tested positive for the drug.
This cannot be happening. He has been very careful. He doesn't take his mask off to chew his food and is tested daily. He feels good. Maybe it is a false positive. Maybe it will all be cleared up and he will still be able to compete.
He is taking another test. It is not negative.
Zhou doesn't lace up his skates on the evening before the day he's been working for his whole life. He sits alone in a hotel room and uses his phone.
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Vincent Zhou (@govincentzhou)
Hey everyone. I have no idea how to start off this video, so I will just get started, and unfortunately I will have to withdraw from the individual event.
I have been isolated so much that the loneliness I have felt in the last month or two has been crushing. The enormity of the situation is insane.
He says that his younger self would be proud of the athlete and person he has become now. You followed your dream. You dedicated your life to it because you made sacrifice for it. Today, you are that person,Vincent.
Zhou shows the commitment that led him to leave his family as a child to chase his skating dreams, the commitment that set him on a 13-year journey and took him far from home. Over the years, his commitment has been tested by financial hardship, injury and the misfortune of coming up at the same time as Chen, widely considered one of the greatest figure skaters ever.
Zhou says in his video that this latest blow will not defeat him.
Hopefully, I will be able to represent Team USA at the world championships. I will be stronger than before. I will be better than before. This isn't the end. This is the setup for a bigger comeback.
Zhou is already talking about the world championships, which take place this week in France, on the day his Olympic dream is broken. A different skater might have missed the competition. Zhou is determined to make this stand, a chance to make up for the year he had imagined ending differently. He wanted to win an Olympic medal. Just stepping on the ice will suffice.
The man is spinning. Not on the ice, but in an office chair. He is 8 years old and his mom is talking to him.
He is an energetic child who has excelled at all sorts of sports and plays the piano. His mom wants him to stick with one activity. He has been dubbed "The Machine" in soccer because he scores so many goals. In skating, he finished one place short of the podium at a competition and told his mom, "I want that medal." Diving might help with college down the road and would be easier on Mom and Dad, who both work demanding jobs in Silicon Valley.
The boy is spinning. He looked at his mom and said, "My heart is with skating."
Ge says that he was very stubborn and had a big personality when he was young.
In Palo Alto, they realized thatVincent needed higher-level coaching and sacrifice. He will have to move, which will mean splitting up the family. It also means Ge will need to quit her job as a software engineer at Oracle to move with him. Could they make ends meet on just one income, and keep up with the high costs of supporting an elite figure skater? Would she be okay without her mom? Would he be okay without his dad? If Max lost his job, what would they do? The family would be together again.
Ge is motivated by a dream. Her parents couldn't take her to practice three times a week so she couldn't join a gymnastics team. She says she felt guilty for not supporting her at the time.
The family thinks that it is only temporary. For two years, giveVincent the chance to learn as much as he can and then come home.
Ge says that his ideal plan was simple and that he never thought his skating career would take off.
I-5 with the stinky cows. It is a 183-mile stretch and 38 miles on the highway through Gilroy.
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum is in Colorado Springs, where Zhou lives and trains. He is looking at the mile markers on the I-5 to see how far he has come. He and his mother traveled down this road every weekend when he was young. He says it takes four hundred miles to get there. I remember it all.
Zhou often talks this way, stopping himself to give more context and then editing his speech in real time. He is not afraid to poke fun at himself and he speaks softly. He says he doesn't think one of his quotes will be on the walls of the museum. I am a little bit too wordy.
As he walks through the museum, dressed in a Team USA tracksuit, gray sneakers and a facemask, he points out the score from the 1980Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey game and calls the 2004 film his favorite movie of all time. Zhou says his highest vertical jump is 30.7 inches.
The old idea that it takes a village to raise a child, especially if that child becomes an Olympian, is spun in front of him by the quote on the wall. There are core people that have been with you the whole journey.
The mother and son traveled 400 miles south to train with Tammy Gambill, an elite coach, after Zhou decided that his heart was with skating. Zhou writes to his classmates about how he is on some great journey to a distant land, but Ge quickly realized regular school will be unsustainable with his skating schedule.
A real estate agent friend lets them stay in an apartment with two other women for free. There is no hot water or electricity. Zhou eats sausages for breakfast. They shower at the dorms. Ge buys him hot chocolate from Starbucks to warm him up when he has stomachaches. In the tough conditions, Zhou loses weight, and when they go back to NorCal, a choreographer says, "Vincent, you shrunk!"
They buy a house in the middle of the rink. They drive north every Thursday night to spend the weekend with their kids. He says Zhou and his sister always try to outdo each other.
Zhou says his mom did everything for him, but nobody would drive that much for him.
Zhou is so young that he is oblivious to the hardship. Ge sees her son&s experiences sleeping on floors and traveling the country to find the best coaching as a gift from life, to have experiences his peers don't. He could not learn this from books.
It pays off. Zhou thrives on ice. He won the national championship at three lower levels in three years. He won the junior national title at the U.S. Championships in the third year.
Everyone was looking at the new kid on the block who was messing things up.
It all comes to a halt seven months later.
It is a secret. Ge says solemnly that the date is etched in her memory. Zhou had been skating with a torn knee meniscus for three years. He pushed through the pain, even though he says it hurt, and that it was mostly on his right side. Surgeons completely remove it. He is young.
Zhou has to do a lot of physical therapy. He doesn't know if he will ever skate again, and it was torture for a young child. He was depressed. He was a new star in the U.S. and suddenly he fell. He was upset.
Zhou says that he was going to online school but was stuck under the same roof. It is easy to slip into a bad mental state when a day becomes gloomy and boring.
Ge reminds him how nice it is to be home and be with his family when he is done skating. He is sent to summer math camps in the Bay Area.
He tries to make new friends while riding his bike in the park. She can see him trying to blend in.
Zhou was unable to process his feelings on his own. I was unable to talk to people. I started to dislike the rink. After a couple months, that faded into an ambivalence or not really caring anymore.
Zhou's mental health is being affected by the ongoing struggles and the social isolation of online school.
He will be going to school in Palo Alto as autumn approaches. Zhou said if she tried to take him to meet with a counselor, she would jump out of her car. She suggests going to school in Southern California and skating after class. Zhou wants online school.
Zhou says that it wasn't a process that was controlled by him and that he doesn't want to go into further detail.
He had been the best skater in the country for three years in a row. He is afraid to step on the ice. She says people gossiped about how her son had changed. She says that he always wanted to present his best before the injury. He couldn't handle it.
He agreed to go with a friend to a public skate session where nobody would care or be watching. Let's go. My competitive self was back. I was trying to do everything again. That is how I got back into it.
His heart is still with skating.
Zhou misses two seasons, and today he says it is the single biggest detriment to his skating career. It felt like a game of catch-up since then.
When I do win a medal or do something good, it is always a surprise. He says they don't expect that out of him. I have always had a goal of achieving great things.
In October of 2021, seven months after a disappointing worlds performance in which he didn't qualify for the free skate, Zhou looks like a different man.
Chen is in imperious form. He has won 14 straight contests since the Olympics and is all but certain to continue that streak. He skates poorly in the short program, including two falls, and finishes the day in fourth.
Zhou is taking advantage. He took the lead with all three of his jumps. The winner of the short program skates last on the second day, a position Zhou is not used to.
He doesn't let the pressure get to him. His free skate, set to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", looks special from the very first jump, a quad lutz. He covers his face when he sees his score. He won by 25 points. It is the first time in three years that anyone has beaten Chen in senior competition.
Zhou is an athlete in control of his own destiny, a master of his mind and body.
At the Olympics training center in Colorado Springs in December, Zhou skates around a busy rink with Beijing hopefuls listening intently to his coach. Ge is sitting on a bleacher watching carefully.
She has spent 13 years feeding and driving her son to the rink before dawn, sitting and watching him progress from doing incomplete to landing the most difficult jumps in the sport. From California to Michigan to Japan, rink after rink. She has cooked him a lot of food, including scallion pancakes, noodles, potstickers, steak with cucumber strips, and tutored him through years of online school. She helped coaches understand him and advocated for him.
Zhou says he can tell when she is going to say something because they have been living together for so long. Through her sacrifice, his mother has made possible for him the opportunity she has given him at the rink. She is his life.
They are looking forward to having Max and Vivian stay for Christmas. Max has been able to visit more frequently because he is working at home. Ge says that since she was young, she has been very independent and recently graduated from MIT, where she was an All-American diver. Zhou will start a program in neuroscience in the fall.
After a run-through of his short program, set to Josh Groban's dreamyVincent (Starry, Starry Night), Zhou attempts quad jumps, a drill Zakrajsek devised to make him practice his technique while fatigued. He says Zhou is the hardest-working male figure skater in the world.
Zhou became the first person in Olympic history to land the quad lutz, the most difficult of the four-rotation jumps, when he was 17. He finished sixth in the Olympics, one place behind Chen.
He struggled to balance school and skating while at Brown University. Zhou won a bronze medal at the World Championships, behind Chen and Hanyu. It was the first time two US men shared a podium since 1996. Zhou came back to Colorado for the Olympics after moving to Canada to train.
Zhou's team puts him through adversity training to train him for consistency. He has been made tired on purpose. We made him nervous because we wanted to. We made him have equipment trouble. He has been made not to sleep a lot on purpose. We have given him many challenges that he can learn to accomplish one by one.
None of them realize how important the training will be.
Zhou is out of a hospital after testing positive in Beijing. He is still trying to understand what happened to him. He developed a sore throat and some congestion, but he says it was nothing more than a cold.
He didn't watch the men's competition. He says it was too emotionally difficult. The results were very painful. After Hanyu made a mistake in the short program, the field was more open than ever. Zhou had beaten three of the top five. It was difficult for him to see the results because he knew he could have medaled.
He worked out with his trainer, listened to music and reconnected with his friends. Josh Groban, the singer of his short program music, reached out after he posted his emotional video. His coaches tried to keep him occupied and reminded him of the things he could look forward to once he got out of the hospital. Zhou was introduced to Wordle by Meekins. He chose to watch the documentary Icarus in order to better understand the scandal surrounding Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva.
He is looking forward to skating on Olympic ice once more, at the figure skating gala, a fun event featuring medalists and others invited to perform, and walking the closing ceremony with his teammates. He is proud to have won an Olympic team silver medal.
There will be more disappointment in store. Zhou was told on the way to the bus that he was not allowed to march because he was a close-contact risk. The decision is made by the Olympic authorities. He watches the rest of Team USA walk away.
The team silver medal is tied up in the Valieva case and could take years to resolve.
After working for his whole life, Zhou is back in Colorado Springs training for the world championships, which he calls his "personal Olympics." Every day is a challenge as the enormity of what happened to him in Beijing sinks in.
My psychologist says that this is similar to grieving for a loved one. He says that it feels like he lost something that he always thought would be with him. That was a dream that I have had my whole life.
There are waves of grief. He woke up from a nightmare and couldn't get up or go to the rink. I walked outside for over an hour and a half, staring at my feet.
When he was a child, he experienced anger, guilt, frustration, pain, and everything else. Since my knee surgery, I haven't felt those things. I knew how bad it was when I was a kid.
He is determined to stay from that hole and pushes himself to stick to his routine. He sometimes convinces himself to forget, but as soon as he steps on the ice, it hits him again. He reminds himself that he has a responsibility that goes beyond himself.
His coaches try to adapt their training plan to what Zhou needs. Sometimes, if he needs to talk, he takes a lap with him. They are trying to make sense of what happened.
He tries to remind Zhou that there is more to life than the ice rink. You are a human being, you are intelligent, and you bring a lot to the world besides your activity in sport.
Sometimes he simply commisesrates. It sucks. I understand. I am so sorry.
Zhou points out with characteristic self-awareness that it's important to let himself feel the pain of his grief, even if it is hard and disruptive.
He says that if he tries to suppress the feelings, they will be stuck in there. That could cause an implosion.
Even if I let things out right now, it might happen because of the circumstances and the way this whole process is working out for me. I am doing my best.
Zhou told his mom as a boy that he wanted a medal. It is difficult for a person who holds himself to high standards to admit. Zhou is determined to be there even though he acknowledges he isn't in the best shape to compete.
It is not my favorite thing to say. He wants to finish off the season with something that he can be proud of. I still have high expectations for myself, but I have to balance that with reality.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
