Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Vincent Zhou on How to Make Your Gold Medal Dreams a Reality | 588
21 Mar 2025
What challenges did Vincent face with balancing sports and academics?
start over and for the right reasons to skate for myself. to skate in an expectation-free environment because they knew that if I stepped foot in an old environment, I would immediately face the same pressures and the same idea that I had to immediately return to my old self, the state that I was at before. And they were right.
Being free of that was a complete game changer for me because they did convince me. I ended up moving to Toronto after the semester ended and that was I had been off the ice for months. When I got on the ice again, I couldn't even, I could hardly do a clean triple jump. And Nationals was in two weeks, and I wasn't even sure if I was going to compete at Nationals.
But I knew that Olympic qualification and just in terms of your whole journey as a skater, you really can't afford to be missing big competitions like that. Because not only does it impact world ranking, it impacts your whole standing in the landscape. That was in the back of my head. What was in the front of my head was that grit that's always been there.
That when it comes down to it, that you can't give up. If you have the chance to try, you have to try. You cannot let the opportunity slip away. I've always believed in that. And that's resulted in some of the most incredible turnarounds in my career. And that was one of those moments because I believed that going to nationals was the right move, no matter how poorly I did.
And I was fully prepared to get a score that I won't even say because it's so embarrassingly low. And then the practices happened. And the day before the short program, I suddenly landed a clean quadruple for the first time again in months. And then the next morning in practice, things were clicking again. I was feeling like Vincent Cho again.
And the competition came and I don't know how, but I skated two clean programs with two quadruples and just everything that I had set out to do that didn't even seem possible just two weeks earlier and came away with a medal and a result that... I would not have thought possible even a couple of days before that was named to the world team.
And yeah, even though that was probably one of, ironically, that was, that was one of my lowest podium finishes at a senior competition yet in the U S yet it felt one of my biggest wins. And at the end of the day, that's what I took away from it. It was one of my biggest personal victories and,
I'm ready to watch this move, by the way. I'm ready to buy popcorn and watch this move. I feel like we're absolutely going through it. This is, again, why this power, right? But this is not different from entrepreneurs, right? You read about every great company, whether it's Google, they're three weeks away from shutting the doors, letting everyone go.
That's this life, and that's that grit, that resilience that most people probably would have stayed at Brown and said, you know what? I'm ready to move on. It just seems like this super daunting... task and that's those elements. It's those moments, right? You just, and you did that. Yeah.
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