Elyce Lin-Gracey’s skating career began with a persistence that impressed her mother.
The first time Rhoda Lin brought her daughter to an ice rink, the 4-year-old girl took the ice and fell. Then got up and fell again. Got up, fell again. Got up and ... well, you get the idea.
The one thing she didn’t do was give up.
“Wow,” Lin remembers herself thinking, “maybe this is something she could do. So, we started some lessons, and she grasped some skills pretty easily and would keep plugging away at those skills she found more difficult. She kept going and going and kind of became what she is.”
Lin-Gracey is, at age 17, one of the sport’s biggest surprises early in this season, the first she has begun as a senior-level international competitor. She makes her senior Grand Prix debut this week at Skate America in Allen, Texas.
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She has won one Challenger Series international competition (Nebelhorn Trophy), finished second in another (Cranberry Cup), placed ahead of reigning world silver medalist Isabeau Levito in both and dramatically raised her personal best score.
How dramatically? Her best total score jumped 19.34 points from Cranberry Cup to Nebelhorn, the third-largest improvement by a U.S. woman from one senior event to another, according to skatingscores.com. Her new personal best, 213.33, also is the best by a U.S. woman since the 2022-23 season.
“It has been amazing to see her progress,” said reigning U.S. champion Amber Glenn, who shares training sessions and a coach, Tammy Gambill, with Lin-Gracey in Colorado Springs.
“I knew I was always capable of it, and I’m happy it has turned out the way it has this season,” Lin-Gracey said.
How did she do it? Once again, persistence plays a big part.
“This season we have been really focusing on consistency through repetition,” Lin-Gracey said. “I keep doing my (program) run-throughs over and over every day until I get both of them clean. I don’t like to move on until it feels like the best I can do.”
Yet neither Lin-Gracey nor Gambill imagined just how good her scores would be at Nebelhorn from Sept. 19-21 in Oberstdorf, Germany.
“When we got there, my thought for her was, ‘Just go out and show them what you do every day in practice and whatever happens, happens,’’’ Gambill said. “She skated a clean short (which she won), and I said before the free, ‘These are experienced girls. Give it your best shot. Give them a run for their money.’’’
Suddenly this high school senior who had finished 10th at last season’s U.S. Championships was in the spotlight. She skated last in the free skate against a Nebelhorn field that included not only Levito but also four other top nine finishers from the 2024 World Championships.
“I wasn’t sure how she was going to handle it, because she hadn’t been in that high pressure situation before,” Gambill said. “But I think she kind of feeds off that a little bit.”
She won the free skate with the second-best score by any senior woman this season and won the event by a whopping 15.2 points.
Suddenly she had put herself in the mix for a possible podium spot at next January’s nationals, where Glenn and Levito should top a group of contenders that will likely also include Sarah Everhardt, fourth in the 2024 nationals, and Olympian Alysa Liu, the two-time U.S. champion coming back after a two-year competitive retirement.
Although she is applying to colleges now, Lin-Gracey said she would take a gap year before entering college “if this season ends up going the way I want.” That would allow her to concentrate on training for a shot at the 2026 Olympic team.
“One of my coaches’ goals for this year was hoping for me to break 200 (total),” Lin-Gracey said. “After Nebelhorn, I have really strong hopes that I can perform well at Skate America and put myself more out there in the world. I would like to hope I am part of that (podium) mix at nationals.”
There is a small world component to Lin-Gracey’s story.
Lin-Gracey shares a hometown, the suburban Los Angeles city of Arcadia, with two-time Olympian Mirai Nagasu, who is 14 years older. They went to the same elementary and middle schools. Both moved to Colorado Springs to train.
Not only that, Nagasu taught Lin-Gracey in Learn to Skate classes at the Pasadena Figure Skating Club for one 10-week session.
At the time, Nagasu was about a year removed from her fourth-place finish in the 2010 Olympics, her first Winter Games. Lin-Gracey was too young then to understand her teacher’s stature. She knew only that Nagasu made classes a delight, so Elyce would immediately look for her on the ice.
“Elyce worshipped Mirai because she was so much fun to be around,” Lin said. “As she got older, Elyce realized, ‘Wow, this is Mirai Nagasu, and she grew up not far from me.’”
Nagasu went on in 2018 to become the first U.S. woman to land a triple Axel jump in the Olympic Games. It was one of eight triples she executed in that team event free skate, making her the first woman to land eight cleanly in an Olympics or World Championships and helping the U.S. win the team bronze medal.
Later in 2018, Lin-Gracey, then 11, won the Pasadena Skating Club’s “Mirai Nagasu Future Star Trophy,” named for Nagasu after the 2018 Winter Games.
“I’m incredibly honored that the Pasadena Figure Skating Club has named a trophy after me, and it’s fitting that Elyce was one of its first recipients,” Nagasu said in a text message. “It feels like she’s giving the trophy some real meaning and legitimacy with all she’s accomplished.”
Until this season, Lin-Gracey had been working herself slowly up the ranks under the tutelage of Natasha Adler DeGuzman and Naomi Nari Nam.
She was bronze medalist at nationals as a junior in 2023, after which U.S. Figure Skating officials suggested having a different set of coaches look at her. They invited her to Colorado Springs to work with Gambill and Drew Meekins.
“I had seen her a few times in competitions, and I thought she was a beautiful skater,” Gambill said. “I thought she had a lot of potential, and I saw she was hungry and willing to work hard.”
What started as a two-week visit in March 2023 turned into a whirlwind of changes for Lin-Gracey and her family once they decided to make the training move permanent in late summer.
As if life wasn’t already a whirlwind for a family with four kids (Elyce is the second oldest), a dog, 10 small parrots and two gerbils. Her older brother, Wesley, is a sophomore at UC-Santa Cruz. Younger siblings Finley and Georgianna are in fifth and third grade, respectively.
“Once I was here. I really loved the training environment,” she said. “I got to skate with national- and international-level athletes every single day.”
She has an alternating group of family members living with her in Colorado Springs. Her father, Andrew Gracey, a biology professor at the University of Southern California, and her mother, a physician and health care administrator, have work schedules that allow remote work and flexibility. When neither can leave California, Lin-Gracey’s maternal grandparents fill in.
“Our whole lives are in California, my other kids are in California and all our animals and household,” Lin said. “So that’s definitely been a challenge for everyone.”
Challenges can come in many forms. Lin-Gracey, who says she is “a bit clumsy,” has split her chin three times while skating, bloodying it most recently on her first day in Colorado.
She fell, then got up. Same old story.
Philip Hersh is a special contributor to NBCSports.com. He has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics.
