GANGNEUNG, South Korea _ The Sochi Olympics were going on a world away. Mirai Nagasu and Adam Rippon weren't there. They were at Nagasu's family home in Arcadia, Calif., sitting on the roof, eating double-double In-N-Out burgers, consoling, commiserating.
They climbed onto the roof to get a better view, to find direction in careers of veteran figure skaters that were spinning in circles.
The answer, Nagasu realized, wasn't in doubles. But triples.
Two months later she was moving from Southern California to Colorado Springs and respected coach Tom Zakrajsek, because she needed a change of scenery and while "I love California, sitting in traffic wasn't my favorite part of living in California." And because Zakrajsek demanded his athletes challenge their physical and psychological limits.
She demanded as much in their first training session: Teach me the triple Axel.
It the Holy Grail for women's skaters, that glistening oasis in the desert, their Everest. San Diego's Tiffany Chin landed them in practice in the mid-1980s � there is grainy Youtube video to prove it � but never when the TV lights were on. Japan's Midori Ito became the first to land one cleanly in international competition in 1988, but only six women had done it since and only two had in the last decade. Only one other woman had landed one at an Olympics.
The only American to do it in international competition is Tonya Harding, in the early 1990s. Kimmie Meissner is credited with landing one at the 2005 U.S. Championships and she stayed on her feet for several other attempts, but most had two-footed or rounded landings.
Which is why last week when Nagasu landed a triple Axel � a big, clean, effortless triple Axel � in the free program of figure skating's team event at the Pyeongchang Olympics, you can see her U.S. teammates rinkside leaping up in the background. And the Canadians, too.
She'll try one again Tuesday night (PST) in the ladies short program, and again in the free program two days later. Land them, and suddenly she's in the medal conversation of a loaded international field. That's the power of the triple Axel.
"The day she asked me to coach her, I said, 'I'll do it provided you're going to be greater and better than you've ever been,'" Zakrajsek says. "It wasn't immediate, but I could tell from the first lesson I worked with her that she was special, that there was a lot to work with.
"It was almost like an iceberg. The skating world had only seen the top but there was so much more underneath."
The Axel jump was named after Norwegian skater Axel Paulsen, who was the first to land one in 1882, although with just 1{ revolutions. It took more than a half-century before Dick Button made it 2{, and nearly a century before the 4-foot-9 Ito made it 3{ for women.
It's the only triple jump where you take off going forward and land going backward, and do it on opposite foots, giving it an extra half-revolution than the five other triples that skaters perform (Lutz, Salchow, flip, loop and toe). That part is obvious.
But its difficulty goes deeper than that, requiring counterintuitive elements of physics along with the opening antes of explosion and agility. You don't necessarily have to jump higher; you have to spin tighter and faster.
Because it's not a toe-pick jump, where you can dig the top of your skate into the ice to provide lift, you must thrust yourself in the air while gliding on the outside forward edge of a single skate. And because rotational velocity is more important than vertical height, you must pull into a spinning position sooner to complete that extra half-revolution.
It's why, incongruously, skaters performing triple Axels are often in the air a briefer amount of time than with double Axels.
"Our body gets accustomed to rotating and stopping the rotation after a certain amount of times," says fellow American Karen Chen, 18, who tried to master one at age 13 but was sidetracked by injuries. "It's like a bad habit. It's hard to break. I feel that's what a lot of it is. And it's hard to try something new, getting over that fear."
Nagasu trained off-ice using a special platform and harness at U.S. Olympic Committee facilities in Colorado Springs. The platform begins spinning your body, and the harness holds you in the air to simulate your speed and position above the ice without the subsequent pounding of the landing.
But there's something else to it, another word that Chen uses, almost in awe: "grit."
"No guts, no glory," Nagasu says, smiling. "If I take a fall, I take a fall. I'll get up and keep going."
Women's skaters, for the most part, have been a conservative lot, either unwilling to push the envelope or unmotivated by a complex scoring system that rewards other aspects of performance and technique.
"It can absolutely be a weapon for you, but you also need to have a well-rounded program beyond that," says 2014 Olympian Ashley Wagner, who devoted little time to trying one. "I've seen many athletes get so wrapped up in the triple Axel that the rest of the program goes downhill. I felt I had so many little points left on the table that if I focused on this one big job that's a maybe, I'd be doing myself a disservice by forgetting to work on the rest of the program.
"It was an easy call for me."
It was an easy call for Nagasu, too. Desperation breeds audacity.
Nagasu didn't master the triple Axel earlier in her career because, well, she didn't need to, winning the U.S. Championship at 14 (too young to skate at the World Championships) and finishing a close fourth in the 2010 Olympics at 16.
Then came 2014. Nagasu was third at nationals, but the U.S. Figure Skating Association controversially named fourth-place Wagner instead to the three-woman team for the Winter Games in Sochi. Nagasu climbed onto her roof, bit into an In-N-Out burger and looked at the view.
"I am not a fade-away type of person," says Nagasu, 24, who first landed a triple Axel at a competition last September. "I don't have that type of personality ... I like to think of myself as a princess, but whenever I step into that competitive field I'm a warrior princess. I like to be spoiled and I like pretty things, but I'm also a fighter and I'm not afraid to take a hard fall."
Ito's Axel in the 1988 Olympics was before the current scoring system. Japan's Mao Asada landed three of them during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, but Nagasu's monster Axel last week 21 seconds into her program received a higher grade of execution from the judges � 1.57 compared to .20, .60 and .80 for Asada's.
"If she can do it, I feel like all of us can do it," Chen says. "We just needed someone to be gutsy and fierce and do it. All of a sudden, we all realize it's possible. It's not that hard, it's not that scary. I think she will inspire so many younger skaters that the impossible is possible.
"I see a future where all of us could potentially have a triple Axel, as long as we have the grit like Mirai."
