Gracie Gold’s Battle for Olympic Glory Ended in a Fight to Save Herself

ASTON, Pa. — The day she covered every mirror in her new apartment because she could not stand the sight of herself anymore was a red flag.

But no one was around to register it.

And Gracie Gold, a figure skater once on the cusp of Olympic stardom, was in no shape to help herself.

Holed up in a Detroit suburb, she kept her lights off so often, she said, that the electric bill one month was less than $20. She slept as much as 24 hours at a time, then stayed awake for three nights straight.

A good day was when she managed to brush her teeth and her hair.

Her dream of an Olympic gold medal? That had evaporated long ago, during her slow boil of a meltdown that she was struggling to keep a lid on.

In 2014, Gold was a charismatic teenage prodigy, hailed as an athletic Grace Kelly because of her tight blond bun, bright red lipstick and regal bearing, her personality so sparkling it sometimes blinded people to the fact that she had not won an individual Olympic medal.

Three years later, in the dark of a Michigan winter, Gold felt her world closing in. She was hiding from her family, gorging on forbidden food and, with the next Olympics less than a year out, unwilling — or unable — some days to summon even the energy required to drive to the practice rink less than 15 minutes away.

On occasion, Gold said, revealing the depths of her mental illness for the first time, she imagined taking her life and nobody finding her body until the landlord came to collect overdue rent.

“I was suicidal for months,” Gold said, adding, “If I had just continued the way I was in Detroit, I’d probably be dead.”

This week the top figure skaters in the country have gathered in Detroit for the national championships, and Gold had planned to be among them, plotting the first chapter of her sequel. But she is not back. Not yet.

As Gold has discovered, mental health is a slippery slope, and she is still trying to find her footing.

Athletes are opening up about depression

Until Gold’s life began to unravel, she couldn’t comprehend mental illness. “I’d hear someone say, ‘I’m so depressed,’ and I’d think, ‘Tough it out,’” she said.

That attitude is typical of elite athletes, said Caroline Silby, a sports psychologist who was a national-caliber skater. She has not treated Gold, but has worked with prodigies like her.

“Some of it is predestined,” Silby said. “The DNA is such that these individuals would be faced with these issues regardless of their Olympic prowess. Some of it is developed through habits and practices that feed the athletic quest for excellence but drive these individuals further away from being healthy, productive non-athletes.”

The Olympic swimming great Michael Phelps, the N.B.A. All-Star DeMar DeRozan and the champion skier Lindsey Vonn are among those who have opened up in recent years about their struggles with depression.

Gold, 23, decided last fall that she was ready to talk publicly about her ordeal, including an unhealthy relationship with food that, at her lowest point, led to an extreme weight gain. She sat for a series of interviews, displaying her wry sense of humor but very little skin, wearing baggy, long-sleeve sweatshirts and jackets that camouflaged her physique.

Gold had lost more than half the extra weight but was too self-conscious, she said, to wear anything as revealing as a tank top or shorts.

The place where Gold feels most at ease is the ice. She returned to it nine months ago, armed with new insights, coping mechanisms and a revamped support team that she hopes will help her better navigate the Olympic ambitions that she never completely abandoned, even at her nadir.

To secure her eligibility for the national championships, Gold entered a high-level event in Moscow last fall against her coach’s recommendation. Whether piecing together a program or her life, Gold is drawn to dramatic narratives, and this one was particularly irresistible: Detroit, where her collapse accelerated, would serve as a backdrop for her comeback.

But Gold wasn’t ready.

She withdrew from nationals two weeks before she was to skate. Her performance in Moscow contributed to the decision. With less than seven months of consistent training behind her, she delivered a short program so ragged that she pulled out of the competition before the long program.

Gold also realized that she did not relish the idea of returning to Michigan. She is so haunted by memories of her time there that, she said, she rerouted a December trip to California to visit her mother and twin sister because her original itinerary required her to fly through Detroit.

Though it was there, in that Stygian apartment, that she bottomed out, Michigan was not where her problems began.

Gold and her twin, Carly, were born 40 minutes apart on Aug. 17, 1995, and her family would later say it was only natural that Gracie led the way out of the womb. Throughout their childhood, she was fixated on being first, and flawless.

In the classroom, she would furiously, and tearfully, erase an entire sentence if she misspelled a single word. By second grade, she had found an outlet for her compulsiveness, taking formal skating lessons at a rink near the family home in Springfield, Mo.

Carly followed her into the sport a few months later and did well, but never rivaled her sister. Unlike Gracie, she was wired more for fun than for perfection.

“She didn’t cross those lines that needed to be crossed to be an elite athlete,” Gracie said of her twin. “She didn’t push past the border of being normal and into the realm of insanity.”

Gold’s skating ambitions led to several moves around the country over a decade. Through her teens, she was accompanied everywhere by her sister and her mother, Denise, a retired emergency room nurse. The twins’ skating schedules consumed Denise’s life and left their father, Carl, an anesthesiologist who had stayed put in Missouri, a weekend parent financing his children’s nascent careers.

“I remember when we were in Illinois, a sports psychologist saying, ‘Can’t you just go to another coach in the area?’” Gold’s mother said. “And I said: ‘No, skating’s not like that. In the whole world there’s only a few coaches that are world-class caliber.”

By the time Gold came along, U.S. Figure Skating — which had produced an unbroken string of Olympic medalists in the women’s competition, including five champions, from 1968 to 2006 — was mired in a drought, and the sport’s popularity stateside was on the wane.

Gold was seen as someone who could reverse America’s fortunes, a personality in the mold of Kelly, the Hollywood star turned royal princess. Gold never saw herself that way, but the comparison sounded compelling, and soon she was reflecting back what others saw, describing Kelly in interviews as her style icon.

“I almost created this other person,” Gold said, adding: “I wanted to be the most flawless, angelic, plastic, Barbie-doll-face human who just says all the right things and does all the right things and is sterling. And people just don’t like her because she’s so perfect.”

Gold’s battle with food begins

Until she was well into her teenage years, Gold said, she didn’t fixate on her weight and never counted calories. She would routinely chug a carton of chocolate milk before practice without a second thought, then promptly burn it off her still-growing frame.

Then one day she weighed herself in front of a coach, a common practice, and the scale read 124 pounds. “That’s a big number,” she remembered the coach saying.

Stung by the remark, Gold searched the internet for weight-loss tips. She stumbled onto a website on which people, primarily young women, shared strategies for extreme weight control. In one post, someone wrote about consuming 200 to 400 calories a day. Gold felt her competitiveness shift into high gear.

“It all started off with me being dramatic and testing the waters,” Gold said, “like I wonder if I could do this.”

She cut her food intake from roughly 2,000 calories a day to a few hundred, ignoring her mother’s warnings that there was no “magic diet” and subsisting many days on meals of one tomato and several cups of coffee.

“The more weight I lost, the quicker and faster I felt on the ice,” Gold said. “It was win-win, because I was skating better and people were saying, ‘You look amazing.’”

Gold’s mother thought her daughter was becoming too thin, and she remembered urging Gracie to eat more in the lead-up to the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

“That was a nervy situation,” Denise Gold said.

Gold said she weighed 118 pounds when, in quick succession, she won her first national title, helped the United States to a bronze in the team event in Sochi and finished fourth in the women’s singles competition.

The next two years were a blur of fashion shoots and celebrity elbow rubbing with the likes of the pop singer Taylor Swift. Then came the 2016 World Figure Skating Championships in Boston. Gold entered the competition fresh off winning her second national title and seemed poised to become the first American woman in a decade to win a singles medal at the event.

But after finishing first in the short program, Gold faltered on her opening jump sequence in the free skate and tumbled to fourth, two spots behind another American, Ashley Wagner, who skated exquisitely.

Gold was devastated.

“It wasn’t just her pain,” Denise Gold said of what fed her daughter’s crushing disappointment. “It was her family’s pain. It was her agent’s pain. It was the country’s pain. It was that she was letting everyone down.”

Within months, Gold’s body, and her psyche, had begun to deteriorate. In the summer of 2016, she arrived in Colorado Springs for one of U.S. Figure Skating’s regular monitoring sessions for elite skaters — something of a training camp, if you will — with an extra 20 pounds on her 5-foot-5 frame and a glower almost perpetually on her face.

Gold was depressed, and her deteriorating relationship with food now involved binge-purge cycles. Her private struggles became immediately clear to Wagner, her rival, who said recently, “There was just no one home, and that was a scary thing to see.”

Wagner alerted a skating official that Gold seemed unwell and needed help. Sam Auxier, the president of U.S. Figure Skating at the time, said the association, which makes licensed psychologists and other specialists available to athletes dealing with mental health problems, had acted promptly. But attempts to assist Gold, he said, went nowhere.

“I don’t know if being more forceful with Gracie would have worked,” Auxier said, “just because she was in such denial.”

In retrospect, Gold said, she should have taken time off in 2016. But with another Olympics on the horizon, she tried to stay the course.

“You want people to see your pain so they see you need help,” Gold said, “but you don’t want to ask for help. So you live in this kind of terrible limbo.”

Gold’s facade crumbled entirely at another Colorado Springs monitoring session in the summer of 2017.

Out of shape after isolating herself in Michigan, Gold took the ice looking like the Grim Reaper, wearing a hoodie and carrying 50 extra pounds.

Her spins sputtered and her jumps, long considered spectacular, landed with a thud.

Perhaps worse than the weight gain was what she had lost. Gold’s smile, one as dazzling as any jump or spin, no longer reached the corners of her mouth, much less the upper reaches of the arena.

When the judges delivered their critiques, some could not hold back tears. Gold interpreted their comments as accusations. “And that’s when I snapped,” she said.

She remembers sobbing, cursing and at one point screaming, “Can’t anybody see the cry for help that is my existence right now?”

One of the judges confirmed Gold’s account of that day. Two members of the camp’s support staff soon approached Gold, persuading her to delay her career and seek treatment. Within a month, she entered an inpatient program for eating disorders, its cost covered by U.S. Figure Skating.

Though initially skeptical about entering the Meadows, a treatment center in Arizona, Gold quickly embraced the experience, she said, “because I thought it literally can’t get any worse or I’m going to die, and I want to live.”

Gold issued a statement that she was taking time off from her sport. Then she disappeared.

“I just dropped off the face of the earth for 45 days,” she said. “It was liberating.”

After treatment, Gold gravitated back to skating

After a year in a fog of depression, Gold welcomed the structure of a daily schedule that stretched from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. She received intensive therapy, including sessions with her parents. She became estranged from them at about the time her father’s medical license was suspended after state regulators said he had stole prescription drugs for personal use.

These days Gold is on better terms with her family. She received a Prozac prescription at the Meadows, but she said she had weaned herself off it. And she comes to the rink in any kind of weather wearing rimless orange sunglasses, which give her a brighter outlook.

Gold gravitated back to skating because she sought the kind of structure that had grounded her during treatment. Last spring, she moved to the Philadelphia area for a fresh start with a new coach, Vincent Restencourt, who earned her trust by insisting that she gradually reverse her weight gain. He insists on dining with Gold at least once a week, and at their first meal together he coaxed her into eating at least half a hamburger, emphasizing that she should not starve herself back into shape.

Since June, Gold has lost more than 30 pounds, the result of a healthier combination of foods, she said, not any fad diet.

She gives skating lessons to young children and adults, trains alongside teenagers and wonders what they must be thinking.

“When I was their age,” Gold said, “I never had a semiretired, mentally ill Olympian come to my rink.”

The comeback feels a lot like starting from scratch. The first time Gold executed a clean triple Lutz, she felt an immense sense of accomplishment. “You forget how magical those moments are,” she said.

Whenever Gold returns to competition, she will have a new long program, the one she planned to unveil in Detroit. It is set to Sara Bareilles’s “She Used to Be Mine,” a song that she found in her mother’s playlist.

As Gold moves forward with her life, the lyrics remind her of why she needed to step back: “She is hard on herself. She is broken and won’t ask for help. She is messy, but she’s kind. She is lonely most of the time.”