Last September, on the advice of a sports psychologist, figure skater Mark Mitchell made himself an insistent reminder of a goal for this season.
Mitchell wanted nothing less than perfection, as expressed in his sport by the score of 6.0. He wrote those numbers with a red magic marker on a piece of paper, then attached the paper with a magnet to the refrigerator door in his Wellesley, Mass., apartment.
There, the numbers have remained, to hector and haunt Mitchell in a year that had been falling far short of his lofty expectations.
Mitchell, 24, who had spent the previous three years as the odd man out of U.S. figure skating, thought his time had come this season. Then he had a poor third-place performance at Skate America in October and was upset in January by Scott Davis for the U.S. title he figured was his.
That defeat battered Mitchell’s confidence so badly he figured the chance for the first 6.0 of his career was gone until next season.
“It turned out it was part of my confidence problem to believe I wasn’t capable of a 6.0,” Mitchell said.
He proved capable Wednesday at the Prague Sport Hall, at least in the eyes of Russian judge Inessa Matveeva. She gave Mitchell a perfect score for artistic impression in the technical program phase of the men’s singles competition at the World Figure Skating Championships.
While only one other judge thought Mitchell merited as much as a 5.9, his overall scores were good enough to place him second. Three-time world champion Kurt Browning of Canada is the leader going into Thursday’s free skate final, worth two-thirds of the total score. Alexei Urmanov of Russia stands third.
U.S. champion Davis, 21, wound up seventh in the technical program. He was penalized for putting both hands on the ice while landing the triple axel opening to his jump combination, one of the eight required elements in the technical program.
“Everyone was making mistakes for some reason,” Davis said.
That was evident in the way the judges rated the 24 competitors. Seven of the final 12 skaters-the seeded group-received at least one score less than 5.0. Such a profusion of 4s is rarely seen at this level.
Davis had two 4.9s; Elvis Stojko of Canada, the 1992 world bronze medalist, went as low as 4.6 to finish fifth; Dmitry Dmitrenko of Ukraine, the European champion, bottomed out at 4.4 as he wound up 18th.
Mitchell had only a minor bobble in his program, landing the triple axel opening to his combination in a way that made him fight for the double jump that followed. It was a mark of his determination that he resisted the temptation to take a costly step after the triple axel to make the second jump safer.
“I just wasn’t going to give in,” Mitchell said.
After deciding to quit a sport in which he felt abused, Mitchell quickly changed his mind and came back for the 1992 world meet, in which he debuted with a strong fifth. That led him to the conclusion that at least the U.S. title would be his this season.
“Instead of skating for myself, as I had always done, I skated to defend something that was never mine to begin with,” Mitchell said.
Once he lost, Mitchell and coach Ronna Gladstone spent five difficult weeks as he tried to convince himself that “I can still do this sport.”
“I hugged him, fought with him, yelled at him and talked with him for hours,” Gladstone said. “We tried everything that a coach and a great athlete would do to get back in synch.”
It obviously worked to perfection.
