San Jose, Calif. • Whenever Angela Wang decides to reinstall all the social media apps on her phone, she’s guaranteed to be overwhelmed by a cascade of kudos. At this point, it’s only a matter of when she chooses to end her self-imposed absence.
The 21-year-old might’ve stunned the women’s field at the 2018 U.S. Figure Skating Championships this week, finishing fourth in the short program Wednesday at the SAP Center in San Jose, Calif., before following that up with a seventh-place finish in Friday’s free skate.
With three Olympic team spots on the line, Wang never flinched in her first go, shining in her routine to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“I have a job to do,” she told The Tribune this week, “and that’s really been my main focus here.”
That job?
To, in a sense, cause a bit of chaos to the status quo.
Pundits had the likes of Ashley Wagner, Mirai Nagasu, Mariah Bell and Karen Chen as the headliners — although Bradie Tennell was the 2018 gold medalist — who’d be battling it out for those three precious tickets to the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. All Wang did Wednesday was put in her most clutch performances of her young career with the Olympics on the line to keep her in the conversation for the rest of the competition.
“Go and deliver,” she told herself this week.
While she couldn’t replicate the same showing Friday as she did Wednesday, Wang hopes her performance this week will serve as a precursor for future success. It was, she said, her first time ever skating in the final warm-up group among the nation’s best.
Angela Wang performs during the women's short program at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
“I always felt like I belonged out there with them,” she said Friday, “so it was really cool to experience the energy, and everything is so different. It was awesome being out there.”
She didn’t have a chance to see any of the comments this week, but figure skating fans flooded Twitter after her short program, saying Wang’s performance deserved a much higher spot than fourth overall. A committee will unveil who earned the three spots on the U.S. Olympic women’s team Saturday morning, based on criteria from results in competitions within the last calendar year.
“Definitely my best U.S. championships ever,” Wang said, “so I’m really stoked with the results from this week and my performances.”
Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Wang started skating at the age of 5, having been introduced to the ice at the County Ice Center in Murray. She eventually joined the Salt Lake Figure Skating Club, which she still represents. She still recalls seeing a precocious toddler, novice skater Nathan Chen, who she later teamed up with on the club.
They eventually called the ice at the Salt Lake City Sports Complex their home rink. The year she actually first started skating? It was 2002, months after the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.
“I have a picture of me when I was 5 sitting on the ice with the Olympic logo,” Wang said.
Her path to this week’s U.S. championships is strikingly similar to Chen’s. At 14, she relocated to Colorado Springs, Colo., full-time to work with coach Christy Krall. Chen left Salt Lake City at 12 to move to Southern California in search of better coaching options, too.
In Colorado Springs, she started training in the same arena that produced American figure skating legend Peggy Fleming. Wang’s father, Laixin, a pharmaceutical drug developer, stayed in Salt Lake City early on while her mother, Shuyan, who is an English-Mandarin translator, helped establish a new life in the hometown of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
“I’m still so, so grateful for everything they’ve done,” Wang said of her parents, who came to the U.S. from China in 1994.
When she’s not competing, Wang is a part-time student at the University of Colorado, pursuing a degree in exercise science and a minor in psychology. It’s quite unlikely she’ll be named to the Olympic team early Saturday morning, but there’s more time ahead, where in the coming years, she doesn’t want to be the surprise performer when going toe-to-toe with the top skaters in America.
As for the almighty lesson gleaned by Angela Wang this week?
“That I can and I do belong on that big stage,” she said.
