Hey, remember that unhinged interview Mirai Nagasu gave following her bafflingly poor free skate performance? The one where Nagasu framed the fucking Olympics as an audition for Dancing With the Stars? The one where she threw her teammates under the bus? What the hell happened there?
Nagasu spoke to People Magazine in an interview published Saturday, and the total strangeness of that post-performance, uhh, performance seems to be sinking in:
“I feel really, really awful about the things I said,” she told PEOPLE on Saturday, in tears. “I feel bad that people think that I was throwing my teammates under the bus because I never wanted to come off that way.”
Regret truly sucks, and Nagasu expresses a lot it in there: for saying she “saved” her teammates; for calling out Canadian skater Gabrielle Daleman; and for the completely bizarre Dancing With the Stars comment. About that:
Nagasu says she was referring to a technique suggested by her sports psychologist after the team event. The psychologist said Nagasu should focus on something else besides trying to repeat her first free skate performance, the thought of which had been hanging around her neck.
“I used that as a distraction and I probably should have kept it to myself. … It didn’t come out the way I wanted it to,” Nagasu says of talking about the reality show, which has seen many Olympians.
It’s an extensive interview, and worth reading in full. Nagasu still can’t fully explain to my satisfaction her bailing on the planned third attempt at the triple axel, but it’s clear she experienced the Olympics as an enormously stressful trial that left her overwhelmed. I am still slapping myself about something I said around the dinner table like 15 years ago, and all I’d done beforehand was eat a second helping of pasta. She was flustered, and blew it. Probably it will not cost her a spot on Dancing With the Stars.