Kaori Sakamoto knew well before the scores were announced. She skated off the ice Thursday night at the Milano Ice Skating Arena with a glum expression on her face. She could sense that the one jump she couldn’t pull off in her free skate was going to keep her from the gold medal.
Alysa Liu, the soon-to-be champion, got up from the leader’s chair as soon as Sakamoto left the ice surface. Liu hugged Sakamoto tight and long. A tear worked its way slowly down Sakamoto’s right cheek. More tears would flow later from the most decorated women’s figure skater in Japanese history.
“I really wanted to skate perfectly here,” Sakamoto said via an interpreter. “Knowing that I couldn’t, and it was the difference for the gold, was painful. I couldn’t stop the tears.”
This was her third and last Winter Olympics. The second, four years ago, had also ended in tears so strong her body shook as she wept. Those tears looked like a mixture of happiness over winning what she calls “a miracle” bronze medal and relief over simply surviving the chaos surrounding the women’s singles event in Beijing.
That 2022 bronze was Sakamoto’s first medal in singles at a global championship. She would win five more, including three straight world titles, the first woman to do that since Peggy Fleming of the United States from 1966 through 1968. She came to Milan favored to become, at 25, the oldest women’s champion since 1908, when figure skating was part of the Summer Games.
Sakamoto has what figure skaters call “the total package.” She can fly across the ice with breathtaking speed, leap far above it, spin elegantly, emote articulately. She combines power with grace and best-in-show use of her edges.
It could have been enough.
It would likely have been had she not landed with an awkward lean on a triple flip jump in the second half of the program. That forced her to abandon the triple toe loop that was to have been combined with the flip.
It is a combination she has completely executed 160 times in 10 years as one of the world’s elite skaters, doing it with a positive grade of execution on 145 of them, according to data on skatingscores.com.
The triple toe has a base value of 4.2 points. Not doing it meant she also lost another 1.75 points because the first jump, now not in combination, drew a repetition penalty because it was her second solo triple flip in the program.
Sakamoto lost to Liu by 1.89 points.
“It was a miracle that I received the bronze (in 2022),” Sakamoto said. “I have a better medal (now)... However, I feel very frustrated and disappointed because I have tried so hard for the past four years.”
What she did in Beijing owed part to circumstances and part to her excellent skating, with personal best scores and third places in both programs.
The heavily favored Kamila Valieva of Russia was caught in a maelstrom after it was revealed she had tested positive for a banned substance less than two months earlier. After winning the short program, Valieva came apart in the free, and the predicted Russian sweep turned into just gold and silver.
That it was Sakamoto who benefitted from Valieva’s collapse was widely applauded. She is a very popular figure in the sport, friendly, expressive and glowingly ebullient on the ice and off.
The public got a good look at her character at last year’s World Championships. Almost as soon as the scores showed Liu had prevented her from winning a fourth straight world title, a broadly smiling Sakamoto walked over to embrace the new champion.
At the medalists’ press conference Thursday night in Milan, a reporter asked Liu how she would “handle, or even approach, superstardom.”
“I mean, I don't know if I'm there, but, um, I kind of don't want to be,” Liu said. “I have no idea how I'm gonna deal with it. Probably wigs. I'm gonna wear some wigs when I go outside.”
Liu paused and grinned before adding, “Nah, I'm playing.”
If the idea of Liu as a superstar in the galaxy of U.S. sports seems unlikely, it would have been a certainty for Sakamoto in Japan had she won gold. Truth be told, the six-time Japanese champion (no mean feat given the depth of talent in her country) may be nearly one already.
Since Midori Ito became the first Japanese woman to win an Olympic figure skating medal, a silver in 1992, the sport has become wildly popular in Japan. Talented women like Mao Asada (silver in 2010) and Shizuka Arakawa (gold in 2006) heightened the interest, and two-time men’s Olympic champion Yuzuru Hanyu took it to a stratospheric level.
With such interest, of course, comes pressure, which Sakamoto began to feel when she was selected for the 2018 Olympics, in which she finished sixth at age 17.
“There were other athletes who didn't qualify, and therefore I really wanted to do well for those people who didn't make it,” she said.
She added some personal poignancy this time by choosing the song “Time To Say Goodbye” as her short program music, a nod to the impending retirement after this season she had announced before the Games. She intends to go on as a coach.
Her last Olympic hurrah, in which she also won a silver team event medal, left her “frustrated and disappointed.” But after getting the individual silver medal, her coach said, “You are a silver medalist, and you can nurture a future gold medalist as a coach, and then you can come back to the Olympics.”
She would be warmly welcomed.
Philip Hersh, who has covered figure skating at 13 straight Olympics, is a special contributor to NBCOlympics.com.