MYSTERY ON WOMEN’S SIDE
World championships been tough
Hockey, the unofficial third language of Canada, is a useful vehicle for explaining this country’s most impressive figureskating lineage.
If Orser to Browning to Stojko to Buttle to Chan doesn’t immediately grab you, think of it as Gretzky to Lemieux to Ovechkin and Crosby to McDavid and you’ll better understand how glorious that 30-year run has been for Canada’s figure-skating men, world champions and trailblazers and Olympians all.
The fab five — Brian Orser, Kurt Browning, Elvis Stojko, Jeffrey Buttle and Patrick Chan — have 24 world championship medals to their credit, including 12 gold, and another six individual medals from the Olympics.
There has been a similar passing of the torch through the decades in all of figure skating’s disciplines, of course, and grand success for pairs like Isabelle Brasseur and Lloyd Eisler and Jamie Sale and David Pelletier, as well as dance teams like ShaeLynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.
But for reasons that mystify, successive generations of Canadian women have struggled to build much of a medal collection. From Kay Thomson to Liz Manley to Josee Chouinard to Jennifer Robinson to Joannie Rochette to Kaetlyn Osmond, our Canadian champs are usually competitive, good for a top 10 and the occasional top five, but hardly ever show up at the sport’s biggest events with two clean skates worthy of a podium finish.
And why is that? Hard to say, really. Robinson declined an interview request, while Rochette couldn’t be reached for comment. A retired member of several men’s national teams said it isn’t a development problem, more a case of Canadian ladies being pushed out by the rise of Japanese, Korean and Chinese skaters and done in by their own nerves on the biggest stages.
Skate Canada’s high-performance director Mike Slipchuk said every one of skating’s strongest countries has a weak spot. With Japan, it’s pairs and dance. Since Alexei Yagudin and Evgeni Plushenko, it has been the Russian men. In the U.S., it has always been their pairs teams. China dominated pairs, but has never been a factor in dance and only rarely threatens the podium in singles.
“With us, for whatever reasons, having a top lady has not been as common as it has been with the men,” said Slipchuk. “Right now we’re starting to see that change a bit with the new group of ladies coming through. But you always have one discipline that doesn’t seem to rank with the others and our ladies have always been a work in progress.”
Osmond, who’s based in Edmonton, and Gabrielle Daleman, who trains in Toronto, will carry the flag into Helsinki this week for this year’s world championships. Osmond, 21, has been eighth and 11th in two previous worlds, while the 19-year-old Daleman has already racked up placings of ninth, 13th and 21st.
Slipchuk said the team’s goal for Helsinki is two to three medals. Should one of them come from the ladies, it would represent a serious breakthrough, given their previous finishes and Canadian history, which consists of only 13 ladies medals.
“For Kaetlyn, a strong top five, if not podium, kind of following the same pattern Joannie had leading into the Vancouver (Olympics), would be a big step,” said Slipchuk. “That being said, is a podium possible? Yes, anything can happen at a world championship.”
If Osmond and Daleman combine for 13 placing points or fewer — by finishing fifth and seventh for instance — they would secure a third spot for a Canadian woman at the 2018 Olympics. That kind of accomplishment strengthens the discipline.
“I feel we’re building something really strong, powerful and motivational,” said Daleman. “It’s just great to see all the young skaters who are looking up to me, Kaetlyn and Alaine (Chartrand). They want to be like us. They want to push the boundaries. It’s great to see Canadian ladies doing more triple-triples and putting more stuff out there. It really shows how the Canadian ladies have grown internationally and how we’re really starting to push some of the top ladies.”
Japanese women have won five of the past 10 worlds, two each went to Russian and Korean skaters, one to Italy’s Carolina Kostner. In Helsinki, the favoured skaters will again be Russians and Japanese. But Osmond took two silver medals on the Grand Prix circuit and added a third Canadian title in Ottawa in January. Daleman finished second to Osmond at nationals, but shocked the skating world with a silver at Four Continents, albeit in the absence of every competitive Russian.
Slipchuk focuses less on the opponents, more on the score.
“Gabby is close to breaking 200, Kaetlyn has been up around the 210 mark, if not a bit higher. That’s what you’ve got to score regardless of who is at worlds. If you’re in that range, you’re putting yourself in a great position to be top eight, top five, if not higher.”
Osmond’s showing at Four Continents wasn’t a confidence builder — she fell once in the short and several times in the long and finished fourth, the same ranking she achieved at the Grand Prix Final. But she seems to have adopted a worry-free attitude heading into Finland.
“This whole year I’ve been focusing on finding my love of skating again, my love of competing again. So that’s what I’m aiming at for worlds. And yes, I want to skate as good as I can skate and hope that will come through in placements. I also want to show everyone that you can come back from anything. I want to show that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.
“After not being at world championships in a few years, I have no expectations, which for me I guess is an added bonus. Everybody else goes in wanting to improve on the placement from last year. I’m literally just excited to skate for myself.”
She is skating for Canada, however. And the country could use a boost. The last Canadian ladies gold was won by Karen Magnussen in 1973. In the 44 years since, just two silvers have been harvested, by Manley in 1988 and Rochette in 2009.
With varying medal potential in all four disciplines, Slipchuk seems content with the 2017 worlds team, which also will form the bulk of the Olympic team. And what of post-PyeongChang? It’s likely that Chan, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford and Virtue and Moir will all retire. So if the team were picking theme music for these world championships, it would have to be a swan song.
Together, Chan, Duhamel and Radford and Virtue and Moir hold 22 Canadian titles, 15 world championship medals, including seven gold, and four individual Olympic medals. They raised the bar and set the stage for a new wave of Canadians in three of the four disciplines.
“I guess it’s just natural that we’d all leave the sport together because we kind of came up in the sport together,” said the 31-yearold Duhamel, who has competed internationally for 16 seasons. “I was rooming with Tessa at junior Grand Prixs when she was 13 years old. I’ve known Patrick since he was like 10. We’ve all competed together and toured together and we were on that Olympic team together in 2014 that won the (team) silver medal.
“Of course each of our careers took different ebbs and flows. It took some of us longer to get to the top of the world than others. But I feel like we have all been a part of each other’s journey and I guess it’s only fitting that our journeys will conclude together as well. And it will be somebody else’s turn to take on our legacy and build something great, the way that we as a team have built something great.”
With us, for whatever reasons, having a top lady has not been as common as it has been with the men.