Bradie 2.0: A Change of Scenery has Tennell Excited for Olympic Season

During the summer of 2020, Bradie Tennell was searching for something.

She had been off the ice during the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring and was struggling with a few little nagging injuries. The combination left her feeling stuck and desperately needing to get out of her comfort zone.

When Tennell's mom suggested she go out to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and train with Tom Zakrajsek at the World Arena for a little while in August, she was hesitant to take the leap and travel during a pandemic.

But mom put her foot down.

"OK, look," Tennell recalls her mom telling her. "Your indecision is killing me. Just get on the plane. Just go."

So Tennell went. And after one lesson with Zakrajsek, she was hooked.

"From my first lesson with him, I just learned so much," she said. "And then, by the third or fourth day, I was like, 'Mom, I think we need to have a talk, because I can't even imagine myself coming home. I love it here. I love Tom. I love everything he's teaching me. Everything he tells me makes sense.'

"It was like I just fit."

OLYMPIC CITY, USA

About a month later, Tennell was dragging four heavy suitcases through empty airports en route to becoming a Colorado Springs resident.

It was the first time the 23-year-old moved away from home — not just from her hometown of Carpentersville, Illinois, but from the house she lived in with her mom and two brothers, Austin and Shane.

In Colorado, she lives in a basement apartment with a roommate, and the quiet was quite an adjustment.

"My brothers have lived in the house my whole life, so I'm used to their constant chatter," Tennell said. "They're boys, which I love, and they're a constant mess in the background. And then I moved out here and I was like, 'OK, if I don't make the noise, then nobody's making noise, and why is it so quiet? What is this?'"

While Tennell's mom does make the occasional trip to visit, Tennell is otherwise living on her own for the first time. She keeps in touch with her brothers over FaceTime to stave off the homesickness but has had to learn how to manage all of her tasks by herself.

"It's scary. Adulting is hard," she said, with a laugh. "I miss my mom. She would just do random little things that I never really registered that were a big help for me. Like just even going to the store. I get home from training and I'm like, 'Oh my god, I need to go to the store.'

"But when she comes out it's always really fun, and I'm really happy now. I feel like I'm living life to the fullest. Or as full as it can be during a pandemic."

Tennell had been to Colorado Springs a number of times before for U.S. Figure Skating's Champs Camp and various other camps and competitions, but had never had time to really see and explore the city. So the first weekend she was there with her mom last summer, they made sure to make a stop at Garden of the Gods — getting sunburnt in the process. She's also made several trips to the new U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Museum, once as a tourist and twice as an athlete ambassador, doing meet-and-greets in the lobby.

After not interacting with fans for a year, Tennell says she had forgotten how much fun it was.

 "I was really excited to see fans and take pictures with them," she said. "Some of them were wearing masks, and it's a little different nowadays, but the feeling of these kids coming up to you and being so excited to meet you, that never changes, and that's something that makes me feel extremely lucky. And it's something that I love, because I remember being that little kid, so now being on the other side of the fence is really awesome."
 
BECOMING BRADIE 2.0

Zakrajsek met Tennell for the first time before she won the 2015 U.S. junior title, when her then-coach Denise Myers brought him to her rink in Chicago for a seminar.

"Bradie wanted to get things right," Zakrajsek recalls. "She was determined to make a correction and do something the right way. You might assume in a sport like this, where it's really exact, that some people would have to be that way. But there are a lot of skaters that only do things the way they're comfortable doing them, or the way they think their body should do them. But Bradie still is the kind of girl that wants to get it right, exactly the way it's supposed to be."

As the coach of other elite skaters, including Tennell's 2018 Olympic teammates Mirai Nagasu and Vincent Zhou, Zakrajsek kept up with Tennell through recent years. When she reached out to him in 2020, initially to consult on her triple Axel, he was happy to come on board, and he spent their first 10 days together just teaching her technique and drills for the jump.

"I think because the language of skating, so to speak, is so easy, I felt like I had coached her before, but I hadn't," Zakrajsek said. "It was so easy to teach her."

"We just clicked right away," Tennell echoed. "I kind of kept waiting for the novelty to wear off, but it never did. He always knows exactly what to say, and the right way to say it, which is something that I love. It's been refreshing, and I wake up every day and I'm so excited to get to the rink and train. I love the daily process of training. It's so much fun for me."

Adding to the fun is the environment fostered among the training group at the World Arena. Tennell has far more elite skaters as training mates in Colorado Springs than she did at her previous rink, and she says that seeing them all working so hard motivates her to work even harder.

"I did need a change for myself. I needed a different environment," Tennell said. "And when I came out here, I instantly found that. I became instant friends with Paige Rydberg, so I think that helped, too. I'm somebody who's not comfortable with change, but this was one change that I desperately needed. So I thought of it like going on an adventure, and seeing where it took me."

So far, it's taking her to all the right places. Zakrajsek says the two had discussed how she felt like she was at college, studying at a university, instead of in high school.

"We weren't going to change anything about her, because she's a great athlete, and she had great training," Zakrajsek said. "But we were going to try to take it to the next level, which meant her taking ownership of her training, her basically driving the decisions as to what was important.

"And I think, because of the elite skating atmosphere at the World Arena, and being on her own, away from mom, it seemed like this is her way of, what we termed last season, becoming Bradie 2.0."

CHASING PERFECTION

Bradie 2.0 had a strong debut at the 2020 Guaranteed Rate Skate America, finishing second, before winning the 2021 Toyota U.S. Figure Skating Championships, reclaiming the title she had previously won in 2018.

It was an accomplishment a long time in the making as, in the intervening years, one small thing always kept her off the top of the podium — she won silver in 2019 and bronze in 2020.

"We restructured her training so that she could deliver the long with the short," Zakrajsek said. "She wanted both performances in the same competition. The goal was for her to regain her title, which she did, but she wasn't focusing on that. She was focusing on seeing how good she could be, and then how did the numbers fall, and where would she finish in relation to the other top women in our country. So we weren't sure she could win, but what we were sure she could do was be her absolute best."

Not only did Tennell do her best, but she did so without fans in the arena and without Zakrajsek behind the boards, as he tested positive for COVID-19 just days before they were due to depart for Las Vegas.

"I just wanted to enjoy every moment of it. I wanted to leave the ice knowing that I put every single thing out there. And that's what I did. It turned out pretty good," Tennell said. "I remember finishing my program. I'm looking up at the ceiling and I'm like, 'I finally did it.'"

All she wanted to do was celebrate with her people, hug her mom and coach, but the tears and balloons had to wait until she arrived home.

Meanwhile, said mom and coach watched her free skate on the phone together.

"I wasn't out of quarantine," Zakrajsek said. "We were just watching it together, and very excited. I was jumping up and down. It was definitely a memorable moment."

While it was difficult on both of them for Zakrajsek to not be there in person, he says that it ended up being a fitting way for Tennell to win.

"It really was about her," Zakrajsek said. "It was about her stepping into herself and saying, 'I can do this.' And the fact that I wasn't there physically underscored the fact that everything we had done to prepare her for that moment allowed her to thrive in that moment. Because it wasn't about me having to stand there and coach her through it. She was ready, she was confident to deliver those two programs. Our whole theme was about empowering Bradie. That is who Bradie 2.0 is. She is herself. She is comfortable in her own skin, with who she is, and to have it work out that way was pretty cool."

Tennell went on to finish ninth at the 2021 ISU World Figure Skating Championships while dealing with severe boot issues, which combined with Karen Chen's fourth-place finish earned the U.S. women the opportunity to secure a third Olympic berth for 2022.

At the 2018 Olympics, Tennell had just burst onto the elite international scene with a bronze medal at the 2017 Skate America. She arrived at her first Games green and wide-eyed.

"Everything about it just kind of opened my eyes in a new way," Tennell said. "I wasn't new to senior, but I was new to the level of attention that the Olympics has. And that was overwhelming for me. But I think that I liked how I did it, just diving headfirst into it, because that's kind of also me as a person. I just dive headfirst into things. I'm so grateful for the experience and how much I learned through it all."

With the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing fast approaching, Tennell is hoping all of her hard work culminates in another opportunity to represent her country on the biggest stage.

And training in Olympic City, USA has been the perfect path to get her there.

"There are days where I'll be sluggish. And then I'll look up and I'll see the rings on the wall and I'll be like, 'That's how I'm going to do it,' Tennell said. "That's what I'm doing this for. That's the goal, right there. That's why I'm on the ice this early.

"Every time I look up at the wall and see the rings there, I'm like, 'Nah, we're in this. That's the goal right there. I want that more than anything in the world, so I'm going to work to get it.'"