An afternoon on the ice with the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympic Games.

Competitive figure skating is an exercise in smoothing over contradictions. An athlete privately takes in all the bodily toil and injury, the gossip and rivalries, while publicly embodying the image of a graceful and transcendent vision gliding, spinning, leaping and forever smiling on the ice. 

Few know this better than the 30-year-old American skater Mirai Nagasu, whose career has included two Olympics, one Olympic bronze medal, seven national championship medals and countless others. As she speaks about figure skating, she is initially a little weary—it is 6:30 a.m. in Portland, Oregon, and she has traveled here from Boston to teach some private skating lessons. “I’ve been skating for so long that I don’t even remember a time period where I wasn’t skating, ” she