Christine Brennan | USA TODAY

USA TODAY

GREENSBORO, N.C. — The audience knew the performance it had just witnessed at the 2020 U.S. Figure Skating Championships wasn’t very good and certainly wouldn’t lead to any kind of a medal. Nonetheless, the spectators cheered warmly. Some stood and applauded. Their ovation lingered.

Gracie Gold knew what was happening.

“I just think it was the story,” she said minutes later. “They weren’t standing for the skating.”

A comeback in figure skating is a rare occurrence, if only because careers are usually so short that they often end even before a skater gets that second chance. Gold, 24, a popular two-time U.S. champion and 2014 Olympic team bronze medalist, last skated at the nationals in 2017.

Now here she was, trying again three years later. Where had she been? “Retired. Out of shape. Off the grid. Mentally ill. The whole works,” she said.

After undergoing treatment for what she said was depression, anxiety and an eating disorder in 2017, and missing the 2018 Olympic season, Gold attempted a comeback in 2019 but fell short of the nationals.

This time, she made it, and she arrived with the hope that the lofty promise her sport once had placed in her had come along too. Her strong practices here this week had only added to the optimism. Perhaps Gracie really was back.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a little too much to expect. The years away caught up with her; although she looks as fit as she has in quite awhile, her nerves kicked in and some old mistakes returned. When her uneven short program was over Thursday, it earned just 54.51 points, far below leader Bradie Tennell’s 78.96 and good enough for just 13th place in a field of 18.

“In comparison to where we started the season, which was like not even registering (for minor events), to see it from where we started, it was a 9 out of 10,” Gold said afterward. “But like overall, 3 out of 10.”

With her scintillating talent, pitch-perfect last name and movie-star looks, Gold appeared destined for the career of her dreams. She nearly won an individual medal in the women’s event at the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games, finishing fourth, and she did help to lead the Americans to the bronze in the inaugural Olympic team competition. She was just 18. Who knew what wonderful things would come next?

But Gold then began an alarming and precipitous slide, starting at the 2016 world championships in Boston, where, in first place after the short program, poised to win the gold medal in her own country, she slipped to fourth overall.

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What had come so easily suddenly seemed incredibly difficult. After a disappointing fifth-place finish at Skate America several months later, Gold spoke boldly about the pressure she felt.

“You don’t often see — there aren’t that many — you just don’t see overweight figure skaters for a reason,” she said. “It’s just something I’ve struggled with this whole year and in previous seasons. It’s just difficult when you’re trying to do the difficult triple jumps. It’s something that I am addressing but it’s obviously not where it should be for this caliber of competition.”

Soon, she was gone from the sport.

“I was very out of shape,” she said. “I thoroughly enjoyed my retirement. This is documented in photographic evidence. There’s no secret I was not in shape to be an athlete let alone a figure skater.”

After her time in treatment at an Arizona clinic, Gold said she “threw away everything. Everything was in the garbage. I sent the dresses back home. We were done.”

And then she wasn’t. She moved to a rink in the Philadelphia area, and slowly, methodically, got back into skating shape. She doesn’t weigh herself anymore. “I don’t get into those numbers,” she said. The jumps returned, and with them, her drive to continue in the sport she has loved since childhood.

“I guess the beauty in it was that I didn’t know where I was going to end up and I didn’t need to know,” she said. “I was just going to take it one day at a time and see where my second chance at skating took me.”

In a sport that increasingly rewards tiny teen jumping rather than mature mastery of the ice, Gold’s competitive future isn’t particularly bright. She will be fighting to catch up with a new generation of American skaters, plus the latest handfuls of jumping beans Russia is producing.

But on this night, there was no need to look ahead quite that far. In some ways, 13th place had never looked so good.

“America loves a comeback story,” Gold said. “We just do.”

Follow USA TODAY Sports' Christine Brennan on Twitter @cbrennansports.

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Gracie Gold's figure skating career: Highs and lows