Before the Team USA Olympics summit in New York City last month, the decorated ice dancers Madison Chock and Evan Bates landed at JFK airport around midnight. Their call time at Manhattan’s Javits Center was seven hours later.

But it wasn’t as though they’d just hopped south from their house in Montreal, nor over from Bates’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Chock’s native California. They were inbound from much further afield: Chongqing, China, where they had just won the top prize at a prestigious regional competition. The trip to New York took over 24 hours but, somehow, they were awake, chipper, and refreshed in the gray convention hall. The only clue that they might be slightly fatigued came in the afternoon, when Bates said to me, “I just sat down for a second, closed my eyes,

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