MSU Cinderella Story

[wbtfg]

Here's a story about an MSU figure skater trying to get into the olympics.

Cleveland native competes at figure skating Nationals

By: MARILYN H. KARFELD Senior Staff Reporter


Gates Mills native Anna Madorsky competes next week at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
Last week, Anna Madorsky was at the indoor rink at the Cleveland Heights Community Center, polishing her freestyle figure skating program with a favorite area coach.

Next week, she’ll be taking the ice as a competitor in the senior ladies division at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in St. Louis.

Only a year ago, competing at so-called Nationals was not a scenario the Gates Mills native, now 22, even dreamed about. It was a life she thought she had left behind.

At 16, Madorsky, an accomplished skater who had won numerous medals, departed Cleveland with her mother and her coach for Fairfax, Va., to take her skating to the next level. She attended a public high school there, but figure skating training consumed most of her time and energy.

By her senior year of high school, the passion she felt for the sport had turned into something a lot less appealing. She placed fifth at the junior level at the South Atlantic Regional Championships, an event she had won the previous year. She battled with her coach and argued with her mother. She struggled with a foot injury, which eventually required surgery.

“I was skating for all the wrong reasons,” says the blond, blue-eyed Madorsky, who attended Hawken School. “It became a job. The coach-student relationship wasn’t clicking the way it used to. It wasn’t fun anymore. I was completely burned out. I was just done.”

After graduation, Madorsky wanted to explore life without the huge commitment of figure skating. She enrolled at Radford University near Roanoke, Va., and she quit skating completely.

“I didn’t go near a rink,” she says. “I didn’t want to see it on TV. I shut it off totally.”

Second semester of her sophomore year, she enrolled in the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and spent three months in the Rocky Mountains, hiking, skiing and camping. She fell in love with that part of the country and transferred to Montana State University in Bozeman, where she’s majoring in anthropology.

Last October, while she was working out in the college fitness center on the elliptical glider, figure skating came on the gym TV. Initially, she put on her headphones to drown out the sound of the sport she had abandoned. Then the results for Skate America, an elite Grand Prix Series competition, came on the screen. Alissa Czisny, a Bowling Green resident who trains in Detroit and had competed against Madorsky in high school, got high marks.

Then one of her former coaches, the one who soured her on the sport, appeared on TV. It was a double blow.

“I almost fell off the elliptical glider,” says Madorsky. “So many emotions, which I had suppressed for so long, hit me. Pain, frustration, sadness n it was very unsettling, very overwhelming.”

She talked to her mother, who had always been very involved in her skating. Ultimately, Madorsky concluded that skating was something she had left unfinished. She didn’t want to look back at age 40 and have any regrets.

So last winter, Madorsky got back on the ice without any real plan except to just make peace with skating. In April, she began training in earnest with Bob Crowley, who had retired from an administrative position with U.S. Figure Skating Association in Colorado Springs and moved to Montana.

Finding her old form was hard at first. “Some of the jumps came back, I had to work at others,” says Madorsky. “I fell a lot. But I knew I could do it. So much of skating is about what you believe you can do.”

She needed a goal to work for and decided to take the senior freestyle test. Even though she had kept her lean, 5 ft.-5 in. body fit over the years, she struggled with her endurance in the 4-1/2-minute senior program. But she passed.

She represented Montana State at the collegiate competition in Hawaii at the end of August, placing 6th out of 50 women. It was the first time since her return to skating, Madorsky says, that things really started to come together.

At the Pacific Northwest Regional Championships in Wyoming in October, no one in the tight-knit skating community even knew who Madorsky was. Putting together two great performances in her short and long programs, Madorsky stunned the crowd by coming in first among the 11 skaters.

This qualified her to skate at the Pacific Coast Sectional Championships, a tough event that includes competitors from southern California, a hotbed of great figure skating. To her shock, she placed fourth out of 12 competitors, claiming the last spot to Nationals.

Crowley calls Madorsky “my reclamation project. A girl who hasn’t competed for four and a half years, to come back, this just doesn’t happen. It’s just short of a miracle.”

In St. Louis, she’ll again skate her short program to a medley of Israeli folk music. Her long program is choreographed to a selection from Debussy’s “Claire de Lune,” a lyrical classical piece.

For a skater at this level, Madorsky’s training regimen is not excessive. She skates two hours a day, usually a session in the morning and one in the afternoon, if there’s ice time available. Off the ice, she does 25 minutes daily endurance training on the stationary bike, and she takes a full load of college classes.

“Having the right attitude goes further than grinding yourself into the ground another two hours after skating,” says Madorsky.

She credits the unflagging support of her father,Larry, a Cleveland attorney, and mother,Susan, who lives in southern California, with much of her success.

Crowley calls Madorsky a “very, very motivated skater” with a “lion’s heart.” Right now, she’s fighting a sinus and ear infection and bronchitis which has made training difficult.

In a sport where judges pay attention to hair and make-up and competitors such as Michelle Kwan skate in costumes designed by Vera Wang, Madorsky is wearing two dresses dating from her high school competitions.

“They’re beautiful, and they fit the music great,” she says.

USFSA will choose the three top skaters from the group of 20 to represent the U.S. at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin in February. Madorsky is realistic about her chances.

She only has two different triple jumps in her program, a triple salchow and a triple toe loop. The top competitors typically have five triples, including the more challenging triple lutz, triple loop and triple flip. They also do more difficult jump combinations than Madorsky attempts.

But the new scoring system has been a boon for her elegant style of skating, Crowley says. The new method awards points for spins, footwork and other aspects of good skating technique previously often discounted in favor of more and more triple jumps.

With the high level of competition at Nationals, Crowley notes that Madorsky could skate a great program and come in 20th out of 20 skaters. “And that would be fine. She’s already far exceeded our expectations by going to St. Louis. That wasn’t even on the radar screen.”

There’s a lot she can improve on, Madorsky knows. But the best part, she says, is regaining her love for the sport of skating. “I have no expectations, I feel no pressure, I am free to do the very best I can. It’s been a total source of authentic joy.”