Mariah Bell entered her seventh season on the senior level of figure skating last year with a reputation for inconsistency in the biggest moments. As she closed in on her 24th birthday, the Colorado native for all her sparkle and fight was a Betamax in a Blu-ray world: technically overmatched by the encroaching generation of youngsters whose programs are packed with point-gobbling quadruple jumps and triple axels.
Skaters like Bell will always be the sentimental favorites of aesthetes who believe the sport has become a numbers game in the years since the judging was overhauled after the 2002 score-fixing scandal. While the changes have made the system more objective and less susceptible to corruption, critics say it’s become a jumping contest that strikes a blow at the artistry that sets figure skating apart from all other sports.
Which is what made Bell’s free skate at the US national championships in January such an indelible moment. Set to kd lang’s elegiac cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, Bell engaged with the music with the sophistication of a mature veteran while landing one clean triple after another, seven of them in all, including a triple flip and a triple toe loop. The tension-and-release redoubled with each element as the buzz in the Greensboro Coliseum – that supersensory communion between performer and audience so dearly missed in the coronavirus era – built towards the climax. And after she landed a triple lutz on the final jump of the four-minute program and the biggest roar of the night swelled throughout the 23,500-seat arena, Bell spiraled and spun to the finish with tears streaming down her face amid a standing ovation.
She finished second behind Alysa Liu, the 14-year-old phenom armed to the hilt with triples and quads no American can match. But anyone in the room or watching on television will tell you the night belonged to Bell. It was the skate of her life, offering up the sort of spine-tingling catharsis only figure skating with its inimitable marriage of artistry and athleticism can elicit. I still can’t stop watching it.
That it all came together for Bell so far along in her journey – an improbable career season that also included two bronze medals on the Grand Prix circuit and her first ISU Challenger gold at Nebelhorn – was no accident. Last year she recommitted herself to her craft under the watch of Adam Rippon, whose legendary work ethic in the southern California rink where they trained under mutual coach Rafael Arutunian caught her attention.
Rippon, who also enjoyed a late-career renaissance despite his own technically limited repertoire, set out to challenge Bell in ways she’d never been challenged before. They developed a training plan far more demanding than anything she’d signed on for in previous years, charting everything from three-hour practices to exhaustive workouts and program run-throughs. “She needed to switch her mindset,” Rippon recalled in January. “What she thought was hard work, I thought of as a light day. Her hard work was what I considered a warm-up.”
The idea was Bell’s grind would pay off not only with improved technical consistency and performance quality (which it did), but ultimately a steeling of confidence going into that final jump of a long program, where she’d been undone so many times in the past. No longer.
While the pandemic cut short Bell’s charmed season and denied her a chance to see where she measured up at worlds, she’s carried her momentum into the 2020-21 campaign with arguably the biggest title of her career at Skate America. Now she finds herself squarely in the mix with Liu, Bradie Tennell, Audrey Shin and Karen Chen for a spot on the 2022 Olympic team after settling for the second alternate spot in 2018. Should Bell make it, she would become the oldest US Olympic women’s singles skater in 94 years. But that doesn’t mean she’s finished with new tricks.
“Who is to say I won’t do a quad or a triple axel?” Bell told NBC in October. “Is it easier for younger athletes? Sure. But I’m just coming into my prime.”
