Paris • A few weeks ago, Vincent Zhou took an unusual request to his boss at the financial services company in New York where he was working in a summer internship: Could he finish a week or so early? There was an Olympic gold medal in France he needed to go pick up.
Fast-forward to Wednesday night in Paris, where Zhou and the other members of the 2022 United States figure skating team found themselves at a boisterous outdoor ceremony accepting gold medals for the team competition at the Beijing Winter Games.
It was all a bit surreal, he said.
“In the tunnel before going out, I was looking at the audience thinking, like, ‘What are they going to think?’” said Zhou, who is also a student at Brown University. “‘Why are these winter athletes coming out at the Summer Olympics?’”
The skaters’ journey to Paris began in February 2022, when they finished second, behind the Russian team, in the team competition. The next day, the scheduled medal ceremony was called off after Russian star Kamila Valieva, then 15, was found to have tested positive for a banned substance before the Games.
That kicked off 30 months of uncertainty — of investigations, of endless appeals, of lives moving forward — that came to a close only last month, when a court in Switzerland cleared the skaters to receive their medals at the Paris Games.
The skaters Wednesday emerged to cheers from a crowd of thousands. The sun was shining. The Eiffel Tower gleamed before them. It was, they all thought, a very summery scene.
Nathan Chen, who also won a gold medal in Beijing in the men’s singles event, joked that it was the warmest medal ceremony he had ever attended.
“The other ones were always freezing, we’d have hand warmers in our pockets,” Chen said, laughing. “Here we’re, like, sweating.”
There was a silver lining to all the waiting, to all this absurdity. The Beijing Olympics were held behind closed doors, behind barbed-wire fencing, during the still-heightened fears brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Athletes wore masks over their mouths. Their families were not allowed to travel with them to the Games.
This summer, in Paris, the figure skaters had their championship moment, finally, and they could do it with their families and friends in the stands.
“We got what we wanted,” said Alexa Knierim, a pairs skater, “and I couldn’t be happier.”
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