Gracie Gold's meltdown caps lackluster season

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — U.S. figure skater Gracie Gold’s meltdown on the ice was over and done with Saturday night when her coach, the venerable Frank Carroll, emerged through the curtains backstage at the U.S. national championships holding Gold’s black warm-up vest.

He was on a mission. He was looking for a trash can.

Moments later, he found one, and stuffed the vest into it.

“That’s what I was told to do,” Carroll said curtly. “I asked her what she wanted me to do with it and she said, ‘Throw it away,’ so that’s what I did.”

It has been a horrible season for the two-time national champion and 2014 Olympic team bronze medalist, with her dreadful sixth-place finish here serving as an appropriate and sad punctuation mark.

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“She has been in a deep, deep, deep depression,” Carroll said. Gold has been reeling since she dropped from first in the short program to fourth overall at the 2016 world championships in Boston.

The next world championships will be held in Helsinki in two months. For the first time in five years, Gold will not be there.

There is a bit of good news, however. A few minutes after Carroll threw her vest away, she went back and quietly fished it out.