Project Play Colorado Conversation with Gracie Gold and Ryan Harris

To the outside world, Gracie Gold is an American hero: a 2014 Olympic bronze medalist and a two-time U.S. National Champion. She is known for her power, grace, and that iconic bright red lip. However, behind the podiums and the polished performances lay a tumultuous battle with mental health, perfectionism, and the suffocating weight of expectation. In a candid conversation with Super Bowl champion Ryan Harris for Project Play Colorado, Gold opened up about the dark realities of professional sports and her journey toward healing.

Her story offers a stark look at the cost of excellence when "good" is no longer enough and "exceptional" becomes the bare minimum. From navigating toxic coaching dynamics to redefining self-worth, Gold’s insights provide a roadmap for athletes, parents, and coaches to prioritize the human being behind the athlete.

Key Takeaways

• The Trap of Perfectionism: For elite athletes, the drive to be exceptional can morph into a debilitating fear of failure, where winning brings relief rather than joy.
• Control and Eating Disorders: In subjective sports like figure skating, eating disorders often manifest as a mechanism to regain control amidst uncertainty.
• Incremental Healing: Recovery doesn't always start with self-love; sometimes, it begins with the manageable goal of simply "not making it worse."
• Separating Performance from Self: A critical skill for young athletes is learning that a bad performance does not make them a "bad person."
• Coaching Dynamics: Athletes must learn to distinguish between a coach who pushes them to greatness and one who inflicts emotional damage.

From Reluctant Skater to Olympic Hopeful

Gold’s entry into the world of figure skating was serendipitous. Originally interested in hockey after a birthday party at an ice rink, her mother steered her toward figure skating to avoid the potential violence and dental bills associated with hockey. Despite coming from a family that wasn't particularly "outdoorsy" or sports-obsessed, Gold found an immediate affinity for the ice.

It wasn't until her early teens, when she began landing triple jumps—the gold standard for senior competition at the time—that the reality of her potential set in. Her parents were realists, viewing the Olympics as something for "people on TV," not their daughter. Yet, as Gold mastered her craft, the dream became tangible. However, this transition from recreational passion to professional pursuit introduced a new, heavier element to her life: stress.

The Growth Spurt Hurdle

The first major challenge to Gold's trajectory occurred just as she was preparing for the junior level. In a single spring, she grew nearly six inches. For a sport reliant on center of gravity and rotational speed, this was catastrophic. Gold describes a season where she "didn't know where her legs started or ended," leading to a crisis of confidence. It was her first encounter with factors completely out of her control, a theme that would later fuel her mental health struggles.

The Burden of "Gold" and the Loss of Joy

As Gold ascended to the senior level, the pressure intensified. The media played a significant role, often using puns on her last name to highlight her shortcomings. Headlines like "Gracie Misses Gold" or "Gold Settles for Bronze" created a narrative where anything less than first place was a failure of her identity.

Perhaps the most telling sign of her deteriorating mental state was her emotional reaction to victory. Ryan Harris noted that many athletes reach a point where the sport they love becomes a source of anxiety. For Gold, this shift was profound.

"At the Olympics and at some of the big events later in my career, I remember that instead of feeling just joy, I also started to feel relief. I almost missed the part where I was excited because I just thought, 'Oh, thank God. Okay, now I can breathe.'"

This reaction is common among high-performers. The bar becomes set so high that excellence is merely the standard, and anything less is a catastrophe. Gold admitted to agonizing over past conversations and performances, performing "autopsies" on interactions from years prior. This overthinking led to severe isolation, where she would retreat to her car or apartment rather than engage with peers, earning her an undeserved reputation for being "unapproachable" or "abrasive."

Control, Isolation, and the Mechanics of an Eating Disorder

Figure skating is a subjective sport. Unlike football, where a touchdown is a fixed point value, or track, where a stopwatch determines the winner, skating relies on the perception of judges. This lack of objective control became a breeding ground for Gold’s eating disorder.

Gold explains that she sought control through calorie restriction. It gave her the illusion of agency in a sport where outcomes were often unpredictable. The positive reinforcement loop was dangerous: as she lost weight, she began to place higher. She correlated the weight loss with success, ignoring the thousands of hours of off-ice conditioning, plyometrics, and run-throughs that were actually driving her performance.

The situation reached a nadir in Detroit, where Gold successfully isolated herself from friends and family. She describes a dark period where she lived in a pitch-black apartment to save money—not out of necessity, but out of a depressive inertia—with electricity bills as low as $16 a month. It was a physical manifestation of her internal state.

The Unique Challenge of Recovery

Gold makes a poignant distinction between treating substance abuse and treating an eating disorder. While an alcoholic can aim to remove alcohol from their life entirely, a person with an eating disorder cannot abstain from food.

"It’s like asking an alcoholic to just have three cocktails a day," Gold notes. She had to learn to live with her "demon" while also using it to survive. This complexity is why her recovery took years, requiring her to dismantle a coping mechanism that had been with her longer than most of her relationships.

A Realistic Approach to Healing

The turning point came when people around her, including fellow skater Ashley Wagner and USOC official Brandon Cycle, refused to ignore her visible struggles. Cycle eventually intervened, printing out treatment forms for a facility in Arizona and ensuring Gold signed them.

Once in treatment, Gold faced the daunting task of rebuilding her self-concept. Traditional affirmations like "I deeply love and forgive myself" felt impossible and inauthentic. Her therapists adjusted their approach, meeting her where she was with a strategy of harm reduction rather than toxic positivity.

"My therapist said, 'Maybe you're so special that you're not treatable... But what if we just didn't break anymore? Maybe we can't reverse the cycle, but what if we could just fix it? You don't even have to make the perfect best choices. What if you just stopped self-destructing?'"

This shifted the goalpost from "happiness" to "survival." By focusing on simply not making the day worse, Gold began a slow, incremental climb out of her depression. It wasn't about sudden enlightenment; it was about stopping the bleeding.

Navigating Coaching and Future Advocacy

Reflecting on her career, Gold offers crucial advice regarding the athlete-coach relationship. She emphasizes that while intensity is often necessary for elite performance, it should never come at the cost of the athlete's human dignity.

She warns against the romanticization of "bad coaching," where athletes convince themselves that enduring emotional abuse is a badge of toughness. Gold advises young athletes and parents to evaluate the "ratio" of success to damage. If a coach is inflicting more emotional harm than the "magic" they bring to the ice, it is time to leave.

Separating the Skater from the Person

If Gold could go back and speak to her younger self, her message would be one of separation. For years, she internalized criticism of her skating as criticism of her character. A bad long program meant she was a "bad person."

"I wish I would have learned the ability to separate criticism of my skating and criticism of myself way earlier," Gold reflects. Understanding that underperformance is an event, not a character trait, is essential for mental longevity in any high-stakes environment.

Conclusion

Gracie Gold’s journey from the heights of Olympic glory to the depths of mental health crises and back again serves as a powerful testament to resilience. By shedding light on the darker corners of perfectionism and the reality of recovery, she challenges the sporting world to look beyond the medal count. Her story reminds us that the most significant victory isn't always standing on the podium—sometimes, it’s simply choosing to stay in the fight and not let a bad day turn into a bad life.