Above: Bradie Tennell prepares to take the ice at the 2025 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas. Photo credit Melanie Heaney/U.S. Figure Skating
By Rachel Lutz
After her first full season training on her own in New Jersey, Bradie Tennell considers the 2024–25 season one of “ups and downs.”
Tennell placed fifth at both of her ISU Grand Prix Series assignments in the fall. She followed those up with a bronze medal at Golden Spin in Zagreb, Croatia, and a pewter medal at the Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita, Kansas. The 2018 and 2021 U.S. champion went on to earn a silver medal at the ISU Four Continents Championships and completed her season with a gold medal and a season-best score of 220.29 at Maria Olszewska Memorial in Poland.
“I’m training by myself, but I’m really not doing this by myself,” Tennell, 27, told SKATING magazine this spring while taking a break from homework. “There are a lot of people who I have behind me, helping me, in my corner.”
Some of those individuals include Benoit Richaud, who Tennell has been working with for about eight years, and Jeremy Allen, who has worked with Tennell since she was 10 years old — though neither coach is based in the Northeast.
“[They] are the perfect coaching combo for me,” she said. “They both know me well. They balance each other out well.”
Richaud recalled knowing that there was something special in Tennell as soon as they began their partnership.
“You know sometimes when you have this gut [feeling] telling you what’s gonna happen?” he said. “I got exactly that. I could already see that something’s going to work.”
“We both have grown quite a bit in our respective roles, which has been a fun thing to look back on,” Tennell added. “He has such faith in me and he always has.”
Despite working together from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, Richaud receives daily videos of Tennell’s progress. It doesn’t hurt that Tennell considers herself highly internally motivated, especially following serious ankle and foot injuries.
“Skating has been a part of me for so long, and I feel like I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t put everything I have into it and work as hard as I possibly could because being able to come back from the injuries that I’ve had, it’s a gift,” she said. “Some athletes aren’t so lucky. It’s made me have a much higher appreciation for my abilities and the fact that I’m able to continue competing at this level.”
Tennell doesn’t shy away from the responsibility of a valuable training session being left solely up to her: to make sure a toe is pointed, or to ensure that at a specific spot she is looking directly at the judges.
“If Benoit was standing here, he would make me do it again,” she said she tells herself. “Benoit’s not standing here, but I’m gonna do it again anyway because I know that’s what I should do. Those are the kinds of things that I take pride in. … It’s hard to train by yourself in that manner and keep going and motivate yourself.”
Their partnership works because they both have the same straightforward approach to feedback.
“He’s not gonna float my boat, so to speak,” Tennell said. “He tells it like it is. If he’s saying that something is good, then it means something is good. If he tells me that he believes in me, then he does believe in me. He is good at inspiring me to push the limits of what I think I can achieve.”
Richaud echoed her comments, adding that their partnership and feedback is “honest, it’s straightforward. It’s connected to the truth.”
“The idea is like when you make a puzzle, you try to reconnect all the pieces,” Richaud said. “That’s how I see my work with her. And now that we have this big base of puzzle, I feel that we can add things.”
Some of those puzzle pieces are beginning to come together ahead of the upcoming season, though Tennell declined to reveal too much at this point.
“I’ve already started thinking about music,” she said, adding that, as much as she loved her free skate the past two years, she and Richaud will begin choreographing something new in early spring. “I’m ready for something new and I’m excited to explore the creative process with him.”
As highly anticipated as the Olympic season is, Tennell has framed her mindset around the excitement, not the pressure.
“I don’t feel pressure when selecting music, because Benoit is the creative genius that he is,” she said. “He holds such a high standard not only for me but for himself. … I feel nothing but excitement when I think about creating something new for the Olympic season with him. I mean, I try not to think of it as pressure. Everyone knows it’s pressure, right? Let’s not kid ourselves! It’s more about how I frame it. I think everything holds an extra layer of excitement this year because the stakes are so high.”
