#78 – Sasha Cohen: The price of achievement, and redefining success

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Cohen went into Turin 2006 as a favorite but physically underprepared.

  It was her second Olympics, after finishing fourth in 2002 at 17. Six months before Turin she had felt in the best physical and mental shape of her life. Over that winter, injuries and equipment problems piled up, and she arrived feeling like she was 'walking a pirate's plank'. Women's figure skating comes at the very end of the Games, so skaters often stay away from the Olympic Village and skip opening ceremonies to protect their focus.

• 02

  She led after the short program despite not having skated it cleanly in weeks.

  Because of her injuries she had struggled even to get through full run-throughs. Landing all three jumping passes and seeing her name in first place felt like a triumph, but a 'temporary victory'. She strained her leg during that skate and, with her coach and physical therapist, chose to skip her 40-minute practice slot the next day, which confused observers because no one skips practice.

• 03

  Small doubts in the warm-up shook her confidence in a sport decided by milliseconds.

  In the five-to-six-minute warm-up before the long program she fell on a triple flip and a triple lutz, jumps she rarely missed. She explains that in figure skating, hesitating for a millisecond throws off a jump's timing. She buried the doubt and broke the moments before the skate into tiny tasks: put on makeup, put on your pants, get on the bus, jog around the arena.

• 04

  Her coach taught her 'you don't fall, you bounce'.

  She fell on the opening triple lutz combination and missed her second jump. Attia marvels that after a fall a skater lands in an unpredictable position yet has to rejoin the choreography and the music right away. He notes that a mistake in tennis does limited damage, while in skating one error can cost everything. Cohen got through the rest with word-by-word self-coaching ('set the shoulders, pull back, snap') and let herself feel the emotion of Romeo and Juliet.

• 05

  In skating, a medal contender who finishes second has 'lost the gold'.

  Cohen won silver because the top three all made mistakes on a messy night. She says that at another Games she might have placed eighth or tenth. Instead of hearing congratulations, she faced questions about her dreams being dashed. She could get through only 30–40 seconds of each of eight interviews before crying, then went through drug testing, an exhibition skate and the closing ceremony, feeling like 'a porcelain doll that's shattered and glued' back together.

• 06

  Winning doesn't settle the question of identity.

  Cohen once assumed that a perfect skate and a gold medal would have left nothing to resolve. Yet she notes that multiple gold medalists like Apolo Ohno and Michael Phelps still struggle, because the moment passes and a new way to prove yourself is needed. Attia is struck at how quickly the public discounted Phelps when two of his butterfly world records fell in 2019.

• 07

  Athletes in her sport get a tiny window, and the public often treats them as resources.

  Most Olympians attend only one Games and very few win medals. In women's skating and gymnastics there is a minimum age of 15, while some Russian skaters peaked at 12 to 14 and were past their best by the time they were eligible. Attia cites Missy Franklin, who was criticized in 2016 after her dominant 2012, as an example of toxic fan expectations.

• 08

  Cohen channeled a diagnosis of ADHD into figure skating.

  She went through three elementary schools in Pasadena. One teacher thought she was deaf, and another gave her mother a book on juvenile delinquents. Her mother chose not to medicate her and put her in gymnastics at five, four hours a day, with 100 V-ups and 300 jumping jacks. A skating birthday party introduced her to gliding, which never felt like a sacrifice to her.

• 09

  Retiring takes away both the highs and lows that defined an athlete's life.

  After stepping away from competition she toured, took acting classes and guest-starred on CSI. She came back for the 2009–10 season and then left. Life felt pleasant for about a year and then 'slack'. She thinks the commonly cited figure that 80% of former Olympians experience some form of depression may be an undercount, because athletes are trained not to admit weakness, even to themselves.

• 10

  She chose to be 'the tadpole in the ocean'.

  Rather than staying a big fish by coaching or judging, she enrolled at Columbia alongside classmates a decade younger, went by her legal name Alexandra, and moved into finance as 'the next competitive thing'. She eventually found that climbing the same kind of mountain felt hollow. She came to see that success is self-defined, fleeting and not the same as happiness.