Mirai Nagasu Apologizes for Saying She was Thinking About 'DWTS' and 'Saved' Team USA
Source - Mirai Nagasu, who made history by becoming the first U.S. woman to land the triple axel at the Olympics earlier in the Games, pulled out of doing the jump again Friday in the women’s long program and finished well off the podium in 10th place. …
“I smiled in the middle of my program, which is very rare for me. I thought of this as my audition for ‘Dancing With the Stars,'” she said before adding later, “I would like to be on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ because I want to be a star.” …
“I saved the team event with Adam [Rippon] and the Shibutanis. We were about to lose our medal,” she said. “So today I put my medal in my pocket and I said, ‘Mirai, you’ve done your job already. This is all just icing.'” …
“I love competing as part of a team, but also it’s been a long, long journey. We’ve had so many other commitments. We went to the Team USA House on the lunar holiday, and it took four hours just to get to the mountain,” she said. “I also haven’t taken a warm shower because there are a lot of people on Team USA and somehow I keep trying to take a shower when all the hot water is gone.”
And – “I feel really, really awful about the things I said,” she told PEOPLE on Saturday, in tears. …
“I had my dream Olympic skate [in the team event] and to me, I’ve been dreaming of that moment for such a long time, it made me feel like a superhero and superheroes save the day. And I wish I had said that we were all superheroes during the team event,” Nagasu explains. … Of the Dancing With the Stars mention, Nagasu says she was referring to a technique suggested by her sports psychologist after the team event.
Goddammit. Why did Mirai deem it necessary to apologize? I’m really starting to hate this easily triggered, apology-happy dystopia we live in. This Sensitivistan we’ve created.
She is Mirai fricking Nagasu. She’s earned the right to say and do whatever the hell she wants. I’m a huge believer in the principle that greatness allows you to get away with things the merely good or the tragically mediocre cannot. Mozart got to act like a vulgar pervert because he was Mozart. Mel Gibson can rebound from being exposed as a violent, drunken, anti-Semitic dickbag because he makes movies like Hacksaw Ridge. I always tolerated David Ortiz bitching about his contract, balls and strikes and scorer’s decisions because he mass produced huge postseason hits and World Series trophies.
Well Mirai gave us the bronze medal in the Team competition. She landed the first Triple Axel in the Ladies event. That entitles her to certain privileges. She earned them. She doesn’t apologize to us. We apologize to her. We failed her. By making her go to the Team USA house which was four hours away. On the lunar holiday, no less. We’re the ones who denied her the basic human right of a hot shower. We’re the ones who expected her to do better than 10th in the singles after she’d already saved the whole team.
And now we’re making her apologize? For what? For wanting to be on Dancing With the Stars? What sane person wouldn’t? Especially when you’re a skater and hope to follow in the proud tradition of Kristi Yamaguchi (Mirror Ball trophy winner), Evan Lysacek (runner up) and Nancy Kerrigan (kind of awkward and terrible, actually). But no. Instead of accepting Mirai’s greatness and unalienable right to talk shit, we have to coerce an unnecessary apology out of her. Hopefully when she’s won on DWTS she’ll take it all back and talk like the bronze medal winner she is.