The name Gracie Gold sounds like a winner.
Gold, who resides in Wilmington while training and teaching figure skating in Aston, Delaware County, is the 2014 and 2016 U.S. champion and an Olympian who earned the bronze medal in the team event in 2014.
But the name and talent came with a lot of expectations, and Gold, 28, is a perfectionist, sometimes to an unhealthy degree.
She describes the pressures from all sides that led to a mélange of trauma in her book that came out last week, OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER: A Memoir of Figure Skating, F*cking Up, and Figuring It Out (Crown, $28.99).
In the memoir, Gold doesn’t hold back on her trauma, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, often unkind coaches, complicated family life, rape, and her excruciatingly slow process with SafeSport.
She never hid that she was bisexual, but an agent suggested that it would be better for her career to put it in the closet until they could figure out a coming out.
What’s more, her father, Carl, an anesthesiologist, lost his job and medical license in 2017, after he was accused of stealing prescription drugs at work for personal use.
Yet, most of the harshest judgment was for herself. She was the Outofshapeworthlessloser.
“That was what I named my voice,” Gold said in an interview on Zoom. “But as stuff started to get worse and fall apart in my life, that voice just became louder and louder and louder. I really started to amp up after that [at] 2016 World Championships.”
After winning nationals, she also won the short program at worlds, only to falter on the long program, landing fourth place overall, the same heartbreaking, just-off-the-podium placement that she got in the individual event at the Olympics.
But lazy? Gold, who is recovering from hip surgery at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., acknowledges that part was never fair: “But I sometimes had trouble focusing my efforts into ways that were productive. My mom had described me like those windup toy cars you pull back and they move forward. That that’s how I would be, except when I ran into a wall, I would just keep hitting it, and that it was very hard for me to redirect.”
Gold added that the idea that American skaters don’t work hard enough is partly a by-product of the Russian doping system.
Said Gold: “The stigma that like Americans are lazy or whatever … but then there’s only one country that seems profoundly better, and in some very strange ways. Is every other country just missing something? Or perhaps they’re doing something differently. And they’re doing something differently in a way that’s a little bit shady. And especially at the Olympics, because I feel like that’s such a sacred event. I just feel like it tarnishes that experience.
“At some point, we all kind of knew that there was some sort of Russian doping. I mean, the documentary Icarus came out years ago. USADA takes everything extremely seriously. … It’s drilled into us on day one.”
Gold has had extreme ups and downs. For a time, she was America’s ice princess — famed coach Frank Carroll, whom she worked with during her most high-profile years — likened her to Grace Kelly and made her over to resemble Philadelphia’s royalty.
After the Olympics, she wound up making cookies with Taylor Swift and hanging out on her yacht with Jaime King, Lorde and the Haim sisters. It was a very, very wild time.
But when it all came crashing down and she started having thoughts of suicide, U.S. Figure Skating and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee arranged to send her to a treatment center in Arizona. Later, she was doing outpatient therapy, sober living, and some coaching, looking for her next move, when a coach at IceWorks in Aston, Vincent Restencourt, called and offered to train her for free. The rink manager and other coaches in Aston believed in her and thought she could make a comeback.
» READ MORE: Gracie Gold looks to return to the U.S. figure skating spotlight on her own terms
“I was on the next plane from Arizona to Pennsylvania, and I never looked back,” Gold writes.
“IceWorks is a big rink, but it has a little bit of a small town feel that I think appealed to my some of my Midwestern roots,” said Gold, who was born in Boston but grew up in Missouri.
Now she’s found more of a balance in life, she said. “[I’m] being more of a carefree athlete. When I do my work and what’s expected to me that I don’t have to bring everything to 200 percent, I don’t have to do extra all the time. That becomes a bad thing. Realizing that I can just be more social, make new friends and that doesn’t make me a bad athlete. “
She’s also taken up some hobbies, tried golfing, gotten deep into crocheting, and “during the pandemic, I got very into interior design.”
“I moved into a different apartment in Wilmington. And I have a very chill landlord. I now have like a pink living room and a teal kitchen. My landlord is like, ‘Yeah, let’s have fun with it. We can always paint over it.’ ”
So, what does her family think of her tell-all book?
Her twin sister, Carly, who was also an elite skater but did not reach the same heights, was in on it the whole time.
“I really wanted it to be perfect for her as well, because it’s my story, but it’s really our story, being twins,” Gracie said. “And she, even if the camera was on me, I mean, she was like, right here. As like my biggest fan and biggest cheerleader and like, biggest confident, and so that was really important.
“I haven’t really talked with either of my parents about it. In typical Gold family fashion, some things we just don’t talk about. I do know that my father’s had a little bit of difficulty with it and like what’s in it and that he’s not always painted as like a really great guy in it.”
After physical therapy in Colorado, Gold plans to return Wilmington and Aston to coach — attempting another comeback.
“I‘d like to try to compete again and keep skating and see what happens. But it depends on how the rehab goes, how the hip feels. And, you know, how life goes.
“Age is just a number,” she said. “I think that the Russians didn’t help the concept of longevity. They’re like, well, the best ones in the world are under 15 and under 100 pounds. So you can’t do that if you don’t fit that mold. And that’s such like a small mold. And I feel like there’s no way most other sports aren’t like that.”