Ashley Wagner Didn't Make the Olympic Team and is 'Furious' but Needs to Check Herself
“I’m furious.”
-@AshWagner2010 venting after her 4th place finish in San Jose @NBCLA #USChamps18 pic.twitter.com/KGU252INdz
— Kenny Holmes (@KHOLMESlive) January 6, 2018
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CBS – Ashley Wagner would have become the oldest Team USA figure skater to go to the Winter Olympics in decades if she had qualified for the 2018 Games.
On Friday, a fourth-place finish at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships confirmed that she would not be going as anything other than an alternate. And Wagner, 26, was not happy about it.
“I’m furious,” she told the media after judges’ scores kept her from qualifying for the 2018 PyeongChang Games. “I’m absolutely furious … I absolutely left one jump on the table, but for me to put out two programs that I did at this competition as solid as I skated and to get those scores, I am furious, and I think deservedly so.”
Look, I’m not here to bury Ashley Wagner or call her a sore loser or anything of the sort. I think if you’ve been reading Barstool for any length of time you know that I take a backseat to no man when it come to my respect for Ashley. She’s a fierce competitor. She a former US champion. So I understand her frustration.
But at some point she just has to understand, it’s a subjective sport. She went with a relatively new program, trying to keep it fresh and it didn’t resonate with the judges. This is the business we’ve chosen and you’ve got to accept your fate is in the hands of others. And besides, as anyone who turned off the football over the weekend to watch the skating saw, she had the misfortune of running into a buzzsaw named Bradie Tennell:
This chick was fearless. And fearsome. I mean, how do you compete against that kind of technical merit and artistry? Her Bradie’s “Cinderella” program owned the weekend. Mirai Nagasu and Karen Chen were solid, as usual. Ultimately Team USA looked at their performances and their history of skating better on the international stage than Ashley has and decided to take the three they think gives us the best chance to medal in PyeongChang. Again, I get it. Ashley poured her heart into her program and left it all out on the ice and in the end, it wasn’t enough to earn her a spot. That’s disappointing. But it’s not about what’s “fair.” It’s about America sending the best teams we possibly can.
Of course right now you’re probably thinking “Well what about the men? Don’t some of them have a much bigger beef than Ashley Wagner?” And you’d be right. Putting aside Nathan Chen and his five F-I-V-E quads,
… Ross Miner isn’t going to the Olympics and he finished second in San Jose. S-E-C-O-N-D. So why isn’t he going to South Korea? Because, like Scotty Hamilton said, the committee’s thinking was he doesn’t have the international success that Vincent Zhou and Adam Rippon have. (Graphic: NBC Sports)
I’m like Scotty, and Ashley and probably most of you. I’m a competitor. I’m wired to believe you win it on the ice, the field, the court in the ring. But when it’s all said and done if one of the ladies brings home a medal, then Team USA will be vindicated and no one will care about the feelings of the woman who couldn’t make the podium at nationals.
No, it’s not fair. But no one ever said figure skating was fair. Go, USA.