The Inside Veer - One weekend, two unforgettable performances

I don’t know a single thing about figure skating, and I only know enough about basketball to recognize when it’s good or bad. But you don’t need any expertise at all to recognize joy when you see it, or to feel the sting when it goes the other way.

I didn’t watch a second of the Olympics the past two weeks until the adrenaline of watching Friday’s state semifinals kept me from sleeping that night. When I finally gave up trying, I opened my phone to watch some Olympic highlights and came across a headline about an “unforgettable performance” by some figure skater I’d never heard of.

I’m all about unforgettable performances, so I tapped the link, then sat mesmerized, rewatching that 4-minute, 35-second clip about eight times.

It’s probably been three or four Olympics since the last time I watched figure skating, and I have no idea how to tell whether one skater is better than another. Pretty much every time I’ve ever seen someone make it through a routine without falling, I’ve been surprised whenever the score was less than a perfect 10.

Two seconds into the clip, before Liu even started gliding across the ice, her mouth creased into the beginning of a smile as she started to move. I knew right then I wasn’t watching a sport I didn’t understand. I was watching someone who looked like she couldn’t wait to show the world what she had in her.

Then she demonstrated it like she’d been waiting to do it for her whole life.

I didn’t know anything about her journey or what led to that moment, and I didn’t care. I’m just grateful for whatever it was. My soul seemed to soar and glide the way she did across the ice, lifted by something I didn’t understand, couldn’t explain and don’t need to.

Still feeling that way Saturday, I settled in to watch Fernley’s attempt to win the 3A state basketball championship.

Unlike Liu, whom I had never seen perform before, I have watched the boys on the Fernley team for their entire high school careers, in multiple sports. I’ve seen them win, lose and grow, and I watched their hearts break at this stage of the season three years in a row.

I wanted badly for those boys to feel the joy they’ve been chasing since before they were teenagers, not for me, but for them. They’ve more than earned a moment like that, but sports don’t hand out joy just because you’ve put in the work. Every time someone wins, it means someone else loses.

Every joyous winner leaves someone else in tears. For the fifth straight season, it was boys from Fernley carrying that weight in their chests instead of the lightness they’ve chased for so long.

I don’t need to understand how to perform whatever a triple axel is, or how to hedge a ball screen to know what joy looks like or what heartbreak feels like. I saw both this weekend, and that headline that prompted me to tap in the early hours of Saturday morning applies to both.

Unforgettable performances.