Vincent Zhou Putting Faith in Preparation for Olympic Season

Vincent Zhou has adopted a personal mantra for this season.
 
"There's a saying, 'It's not always the best athlete who wins, it's the most well-prepared athlete who wins,'" Zhou said. "I'm trying to be that most well-prepared athlete so that I have the best shot I can have at medaling."
 
The Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 are Zhou's ultimate goal. But first he has the Grand Prix Final in Osaka, Japan, Dec. 9-12 (the event was ultimately postponed due to the pandemic) and then the 2022 Toyota U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Nashville, Tennessee, in early January. 
 
Zhou qualified for the Grand Prix Final with his gold-medal-winning performance at 2021 Guaranteed Rate Skate America in October and a silver medal at NHK Trophy last month.
 
At Skate America®, Zhou was on top of his game – landing five quads in the free skate -- while defeating teammate Nathan Chen and Japan's Shoma Uno. 
 
"That was a pretty insane experience," said Zhou, who turned 21 the day after the event. "Everything worked out. It was a test of trusting my instincts and the team communication was there, the training was there, the muscle memory was there.
 
"It feels like all the long hours in the rink and the hard work every day -- the diligence on all the elements -- it all paid off."
 
Uno certainly noticed. "I heard Shoma at the press conference at Skate America talk about how he saw how well-trained I was and he knew that he himself had to train more to improve," Zhou said. "He skated really well at NHK and I definitely see he's been putting in the work, so it makes me motivated to put in the work, too."
 
But Zhou couldn't do that prior to NHK through no fault of his own. He got sick – nothing COVID-19-related – and did not feel up to training in the weeks leading into the Tokyo competition. "Generally I'm really healthy," said Zhou, who trains in Colorado Springs, Colorado. "I can count with one hand the number of times I've been sick in the last decade."
 
His technique and confidence suffered from the lack of preparation. "I proved my own point," Zhou said of his mantra.
 
In the short program, Zhou was only about three points shy of Uno. But he struggled in the free skate, popping his opening jump, a quad Lutz, and then held on.
 
"I did get another medal, so I guess I can't be too upset with the results, but we all know that it was a pretty mediocre free skate," Zhou said. "I know I'm capable of way better."
 
But he sees a bright side. "At least I'm glad it happened now and not at the Olympics," the Palo Alto, California, native said.
 
Zhou has experience with bouncing back. He had a disastrous short program at the ISU World Figure Skating Championships 2021 in Stockholm, placing 25th and failing to qualify for the free skate.
 
"Typically after extremely stressful or emotionally bad or traumatic events, a lot of the time you'd expect to take a long time to recover or at least go through some stages of grief or denial," Zhou said. "I kept waiting for that lonely night where you're going to break down and just cry the whole night. I kept waiting for it to come and it never did."
 
He immediately starting making plans to correct his shortcomings with his team and his mother. "I'm pretty sure I talked for 12 hours straight after that short program," Zhou said.
 
Six months later, he won the Nebelhorn Trophy in Oberstdorf, Germany, finishing the job of securing the third Olympic spot in men's figure skating for Team USA.
 
And Zhou did it with the same short program from last season, "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)" by Josh Groban, which he kept for reasons other than it being his namesake. "The lyrics and the pacing of the program are natural for me to skate to and to emote to," Zhou said. "It brings out a very passionate and nuanced side of my interpretation that people haven't seen before."
 
His free skate also plays to his strengths and includes music from the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
 
"It's very comfortable," Zhou said of the program, which he also skated to in winning the bronze medal at the 2019 World Championships. "When I played the music and just skated around to it for the first time this year, it just felt right and it's culturally appropriate for the setting of the Olympics. It's also culturally appropriate for me as a person."
 
Zhou's parents were born in China, arriving in the United States in 1992, where they became computer software engineers. He hopes his grandparents, who live in Beijing, can attend the Games if he competes.
 
Four years ago, Zhou was only 17 when he became the youngest member of Team USA at the 2018 PyeongChang Games. He was the 2017 World Junior champion and made the U.S. Olympic Team in his first season competing as a senior internationally.
 
Zhou finished sixth after becoming the first skater to land a quadruple Lutz – actually two of them – in Olympic competition, and said he had the "performance that I always dreamed of since childhood."
 
During the pandemic, Zhou said the flame that once burned inside of him returned in full force, carrying with it a desire to live out more of his dreams.
 
"Every single day, no matter good or bad, I have that end goal in sight," he said. "I just have this boundless drive to want to show just how good I can be and I think what's more valuable than anything else is having that desire and believing in myself."
 
And in his preparation.