They both got carried away in their Olympic debuts, one because he was thinking about how well things were going once he was on the ice, the other because he was too worried about how things would go once he got there.
The result was that Matt Savoie of Peoria and Evan Lysacek of Naperville had mental lapses that led to big physical errors, leaving them eighth and 10th, respectively, after Tuesday’s short program of the men’s figure skating competition. The free skate final is Thursday.
“I’m extremely disappointed,” Lysacek said. “More than that, I’m shocked.”
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Reigning world bronze medalist Lysacek botched two of the three jump elements in the 2-minute-50-second program, falling on his triple axel and turning his planned triple flip into a double. He plodded aimlessly through the final minute after the latter mistake sucked the remaining air out of him.
“This hasn’t happened to me in a long time,” he said. “How can you even fathom it will happen at the Olympics?”
Lysacek was determined to avoid such a situation. In the final 10 hours before he started skating at 10:53 p.m., Lysacek kept checking his watch, went over his program “at least 100 times” in his head and also watched video of it.
“I couldn’t wait to get on the ice,” Lysacek said.
“I ran out of the gate like a racehorse and ended up rushing everything. It wasn’t me skating today. It was like my mind was somewhere else.”
Savoie found himself in the opposite state of mind.
“I was impressed at how I didn’t feel this was a momentous occasion, and it is,” he said.
Savoie calmly nailed the first two jump elements in his program and found himself looking past the final jump to the spins and footwork that have always been his crowd-pleasing strength.
“That would have been an easy mistake for me to make,” Savoie said.
Suddenly, he was too close to the boards, and a triple lutz became a double followed by a stumble. The points he lost were the difference between eighth and fifth place.