BEIJING — As quickly as Karen Chen skates onto the ice, the dreaded feeling returns.
Her coach may very well be pounding on the wall of the rink to get her excited. Her household and mates may very well be screaming encouragement from the stands. The followers may very well be cheering her title.
Yet in that highlight, standing there ready for the music to start, as she is going to in Thursday’s free skate of the Beijing Games, she nonetheless feels so very susceptible.
“It’s only me, my body and my mind, and it just hits me that, ugh, I’m doing this by myself,” mentioned Chen, a two-time Olympian and the 2017 U.S. nationwide champion. “That can be so scary.”
She is aware of the treatment is shut, so shut that she carries it together with her. A fast contact of her jade rabbit necklace and a look at her costume remind her that will probably be OK as a result of her mom is on the market together with her, too.
Chen’s mom, Hsiu-Hui Tseng, gave her that necklace when Chen was 9 after her first critical damage in the game, a chipped bone in her foot, and the rabbit is Chen’s Chinese zodiac signal. It’s meant to guard her, and Chen at all times wears it.
And her costume? That’s a unique story, one stitched collectively over years of a mom’s love and help for a daughter who had an Olympic dream and now has realized it twice.
For most of Chen’s profession, her mom has made her glowing costumes which are fastidiously designed with Swarovski crystals which are the very best for catching the sunshine. There may very well be 1000’s of them on every costume, and every is individually glued on. The larger ones are additionally sewn on, so that they don’t fall off.
At this degree of the game, the place attire can price a number of thousand {dollars} every — or extra as a result of, in some circumstances, Vera Wang has designed them — a home made gown that may go muster on the high degree of the game is a rarity.
There’s a lavender one with a deep V lined with shining butterflies and flowers, for a efficiency to “Butterfly Lovers Concerto.” Another, purple with a splash of white and fuchsia flowers that flows daintily throughout the bodice. A black one with a moody deep V design of dazzling blues on the entrance and an identical deep scoop on the again.
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And one which’s amongst Chen’s favorites: a lavender gown with an ombré design that took Tseng a number of tries to good as a result of she purchased the material from a Jo-Ann retailer and dyed it herself. You can be taught something on YouTube, she mentioned.
Chen, 22, wore meticulously mom-made attire in each the quick program and the free skate of the group occasion final week, when the United States received the silver medal. She can’t think about sporting a gown made by anybody else.
“It’s hard to explain, but I just feel the best when I wear them,” Chen mentioned, a number of days after arriving in Beijing.
At first, Chen didn’t skate with bespoke attire. When she was about 7 or 8 and wanted a fancy dress, her mom simply purchased one on the rink’s professional store, albeit balking on the value. Chen ended up complaining about it, saying “Oh my God, this is like too itchy and I don’t want to wear this!”
Her mom provided a well-known parental reply: “I paid money for this. You are going to wear it.”
And Chen did put on it, however just for some time. Her complaints wore her mom down.
“Her body is very sensitive, and so her dresses need to fit in a certain way,” Tseng mentioned. “So I said, ‘I’ll see what I can do’ and solved that issue on my own.”
Tseng’s previous Barbie dolls helped. As a lady in Taiwan, Tseng was not glad with Mattel’s style selections, so she ripped aside her dolls’ garments to look at the deconstructed material, then used them as a template for her personal designs and borrowed her mom’s stitching machine to create new, improved garments.
Years later, she additionally tore aside her daughter’s first competitors gown and put it again collectively in a manner that made Chen really feel snug — and, perhaps extra essential, assured.
That dressmaking was simply the beginning of Tseng’s devotion to her daughter’s profession — and Chen mentioned her mom’s effort and sacrifices have helped her attain the highest of her sport.
“I was so young and needed so much help that I couldn’t have done this without her,” Chen mentioned. “When I made the team in 2018, it was a dream come true, and I also knew that my mom was behind it all.”
When Chen was in center faculty, her household partly uprooted so she may prepare with the internationally identified coach Tammy Gambill, who was primarily based in Riverside, Calif., 400 miles south of the place the Chens lived in Fremont. Chen’s father, Chih-Hsiu Chen, couldn’t transfer due to his job, however Tseng may work remotely as a database engineer, so she rented an residence in Riverside, the place the household lived throughout the week.
Eventually, Chen’s youthful brother, Jeffrey, additionally began coaching in Riverside, as an ice dancer. On weekends, they might drive again to Fremont so the entire household may very well be collectively, and Chen remembers her mom being so drained throughout the six-to-eight hour drive in their Honda minivan that Chinese podcasts or sport reveals could be blasting in the automobile to maintain her awake.
During the week, Tseng would get up at 6 a.m. for East Coast enterprise conferences and convey her laptop computer to the rink, the place she would work in the stands.
“My husband and I could never do a sport like figure skating because we didn’t have the resources,” Tseng mentioned. “We will do anything to give our children the opportunity to do what they love.”
Tseng continued to make Chen’s attire till 2016, when Chen’s first likelihood on the Olympics drew close to, and they turned to an expert as an alternative. Dresses are such an essential a part of a skater’s presentation that athletes present them to coaches and even judges earlier than competitions to get suggestions on how a gown makes their physique look as they carry out jumps and spins.
“The dress, the hair, the makeup, the music selection and the story behind it, it’s all about the packaging and that’s a big thing, right?” Drew Meekins, Chen’s choreographer, mentioned. “The dress needs to show off the body line in a way that’s most appealing to show things like posture and stretch of the limbs. All those things are evaluated in the program component marks.”
He added, “Karen’s mom is great at highlighting her in just that perfect way.”
But the price of these professionally made costumes is excessive, and Tseng mentioned she typically paid greater than $3,500, and additional for alterations. Sometimes Chen had to purchase an entire new gown as a result of the judges didn’t just like the one she confirmed them. In 2018, the price turned unmanageable and Chen went again to her mom for costumes. Tseng additionally makes costumes for her son, Jeffrey, and his ice dancing associate, Katarina Wolfkostin. They had been named as alternates for this Olympics.
“I don’t care what people say because, first, it saves money and second of all, she’s super, super talented,” Chen mentioned. “That’s why my dresses are always drop-dead gorgeous.”
Before turning on her stitching machine, Tseng listens to the music Chen will carry out to and then spends hours looking on-line and flipping by means of magazines to take a look at marriage ceremony attire, gymnastics outfits, different skaters’ costumes and style, in normal, to get concepts for a brand new creation.
Then she meets with Chen to debate prospects and, later, tweaks similar to which stone colour seems greatest and which path the crystal design ought to go.
Tseng mentioned she spends about $1,000-$1,500 on every gown and creates about 10 of them per 12 months. Chen receives them by FedEx on the United States Olympic coaching heart in Colorado, the place she has lived and skilled for the previous few years — and every time she opens the field, her coronary heart jumps.
Her newest gown arrived the day earlier than she left for Beijing.
For 20 hours a day, 4 days in a row, Tseng had reduce material, sewed and glued, and sewed some extra for her daughter, who plans to retire quickly from worldwide competitors and return to her pre-med research at Cornell University.
“I barely slept at all, but I wanted to make something really special,” Tseng mentioned. “I know in the future I won’t have this chance because she will have a different life, and I will miss this.”
Chen, who was in thirteenth place in the ladies’s singles competitors after Tuesday’s quick program, mentioned she plans to put on the brand new gown for the free skate on Thursday. She wouldn’t describe it as a result of she needed it to be a shock.
“It represents our special bond,” she mentioned.
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