Interview with Ting Cui, 2019 World Junior Medalist
We spoke to Ting Cui about injuries, returning to competition & more.
[TW: ED mentions]
spotify:
https://sptfy.com/64qn
youtube:
https://bit.ly/3qFJTK9
article:
https://bit.ly/3ddynjx
The article's quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Important quotes from the interview:
"Nila: When you do a sport for so long and you reach that highest level, there’s that sense of obligation that you have to persist regardless of whether you want to or not. And that’s not always the case for everyone, but I know you’ve said that you really want to rekindle your love for figure skating. How has this past year allowed you to take ownership of your career and re-evaluate and understand your relationship with figure skating?
Ting: Good question. I definitely wanted to rekindle my love for the sport. In the past year, a lot of big changes have been made in my life. Transitioning from high school to college, a teenager to entering young adulthood, physical and mental changes, all that, I have had to re-examine the position figure skating has taken in my life.
Going through the second injury, I wasn't sure if I still wanted to skate. I had been dealing with so much and maybe this was just a chance to get a fresh start to focus on college and the second career I'll have after skating. Then, I started trying a few different things but nothing quite hit the soft spot in my heart like skating did. I got my license so I started driving myself to the rink. Everything I’ve been doing in the past couple of months has been for me. If I went to the rink it was because of me, and everything had to be initiated by me. Even if I didn't want to go, that was my choice now. I could decide what I did that day.
Your parents aren’t there, there’s no one there to hound you or lecture you for slacking off or showing up late. All of that is your responsibility now. That’s what I’ve been doing and it’s taken a little bit of time to adjust but everything I do now is because I want to be there. I want to show up, I want to skate, and go through that process to let myself train differently. I always thought I had to train a certain way, like I had to do this, this and this, like a checklist, which is what you should be doing but in my head it was so cut and paste everyday, there was no wiggle room for creativity. When I wasn’t able to jump, letting myself have creative moments to blast music I like and do a little bit of improv on the ice was completely freeing. Saying it now, it’s such a minor change but it was the biggest switch in my head. Like skating doesn’t have to be this one way that I've done my whole life. Skating can be fun and I really love it. I love skating now, it’s what I like to do so I show up to the rink everyday and have a good time. Regardless of how many times I've fallen in practice or if it was a terrible day, I’m still happy to be there. I know what the alternative is now, not being able to skate, so I’m just happy to be able to train and do what I want to do."
"Ting: I have gotten all my triple jumps which is amazing and has been my goal for the longest time. I have grown so much within the past two years and my body has changed, I have more of an adult body now. My coaches have been super supportive of it and I'm so grateful for that, there’s been no negativity there with body image. But my body is just so different. I went to the doctor this week and she told me my growth plates are still open. I’m 5’6 now and I measured myself last week. It's all crazy to me. I can’t believe I'm 5’6 and still jumping!"
"Ting: For some more context, I was kind of coach-less at the time. I had moved away from Tom after getting injured the second time. I have to say, he was great, but I just didn’t feel the connection between us. I knew Colorado wasn’t the right environment for me. I had made it through two years there, and even that I feel like I barely made it through. The training environment was very competitive which I liked, but too crazy. Like there were so many kids on the ice, such long lines for music, sometimes you couldn't even get it played. I knew I wanted to figure out a different place to train. Especially as I was applying to colleges, that really played into everything. As I was injured, I couldn't skate and I didn't know if I wanted to continue skating while starting college. So it just felt like a one or another thing at that point in my life. I was coach-less and back home, training with my long time stroking coach Natalia Linichuk. Natalia is amazing. She’s an Olympic champion and she’s trained olympic champions so she has always been such an idol. It was just hard to think I could talk to her about it. She’s my head coach now along with Priscilla Hill and Roland Burghart. The three of them are forming a team. But now I do talk to her about stuff!"
"Ting: I'm going to be doing a bunch of summer competitions actually. I just did my very first competition in two years last weekend, at White Rose Invitational. It was so exciting just to be out there and I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be. I definitely wasn’t ready for the competition but I needed to get myself out there. It went like how it has been going in training. Not perfect but it was how I had been training so I can’t really be upset or anything over that. I’m just quite not there yet but getting through it was the most important thing. It was a one day competition, I did my long program and the best part was when I stepped onto the ice after they called my name, I still remembered that feeling of when it’s my turn to compete, I have the ice all to myself. There’s a certain quiet around the rink and in my mind I had been visualizing this moment in the months prior to the competition because I couldn't imagine myself competing at all and just being alone for four minutes and having it feel familiar was really amazing. I had thought I had forgotten what that was all about. To stay calm and get through that full program was a win for m
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