Osmond puts quest for perfection aside
Kaetlyn Osmond chased perfection for an entire season and might as well have been hunting unicorns.
Sure, she regained her Canadian ladies figure skating crown and capped the year with a dazzling silver-medal performance at the world championships.
But the quest was still counterproductive. Foolhardy, even.
“I aim to skate as clean as possible,” the Edmonton-based skater said last week on a conference call. “I realized last year perfection I can’t aim for because it doesn’t exist.”
Her coach Ravi Walia reinforced that notion Thursday as Osmond practised in Regina for Skate Canada International, her first Grand Prix assignment of 2017-18.
“We learned last season, when she was focusing on perfection, it wasn’t working. It was creating issues with her results and her success, so we just changed her mindset,” said Walia, who has coached Osmond for a dozen years in Edmonton.
“The focus is on excellence and it seemed to really help. She knows that if she just focuses on excellence, more likely the perfection will be there.
“We talked about it again today. Perfection, it’s hard when you’re out there. Last season, she was getting close. The next step was perfection and that’s when she hit a roadblock. Of course you want to be perfect. That’s every athlete’s goal. It wasn’t working. I told her, ‘Forget that.’”
It sounds like little more than semantics. But a skater who has it figured out between the ears will often show it on the ice, especially when it counts most.
She works weekly with a sports psychologist and there is no questioning her mental toughness. If the pursuit of excellence works better than unicorn hunting, so be it.
She approaches every competition with the same mindset anyway. She will tell you, for instance, that the local events she won in Vancouver and Edmonton this summer are just as important to her as anything else she’ll do this season, which most people refer to as an Olympic season.
“I think about it, but I think of it as just another competition because essentially it is,” said Osmond. “I never dreamt of the Olympics growing up. It’s not something that I watched on TV, it’s not something my parents ever talked about.”