Osmond looks to win her third figure skating title
Two-time Canadian women’s figure skating champion Kaetlyn Osmond has gone through a lot of ups and down in the past year and a half, but her ability to perform on the ice has survived better than her Olympic rings tattoo.
Osmond, who skates out of the Ice Palace Figure Skating Club in West Edmonton Mall, said she’s feeling better and skating better than she ever has leading up to a competition as she heads into the Canadian National Skating Championships in Halifax on Friday ( short program) and Saturday (free skate).
“Obviously, I want to do really well and get my national title back, but my main focus ... is enjoy being there, enjoy being on the ice in front of people, feel the excitement, feel like myself again and just skate the way I’ve been doing in practice, and show the people that I am back,” she said.
“I took the year off last year and a lot of people improved and I improved also, but you never know what it’s going to be like.
“Obviously, I care if I get my national title back or not, but if it doesn’t happen this year, it doesn’t happen and I’ ll just get back to it next year.”
Osmond, 20, got the tattoo just above the outside of her right ankle to celebrate helping Canada win a silver medal in the figure skating team event at the 2014 Olympic Games; Now it also tells a story about why she missed the 2015 Canadian championships and t he 2014-15 competitive season. She broke her right leg in an accident Sept. 11, 2014, while trying to avoid another skater during a training session. She ended up having two surgeries five months apart.
“If you’re not looking at it up close, you would never tell that it’s all mangled,” Osmond said about the tattoo, which now has one of the Olympic rings a little off-centre. The doctors “only caught the edge of one of the rings, so it’s OK. Maybe I’ ll go get it fixed eventually, but I really don’t want a needle to go around there.”
Osmond discovered after the first surgery that the doctors spent “quite a bit of time” trying to figure out a way to avoid cutting through her tattoo.
“They settled with putting a lot of stitches and staples in to try to keep the line as straight as possible,” she said. “I actually don’t mind a bit of scar in the tattoo. It leaves a story. I know that it was a unique process and now it even shows in my tattoo.”
After a lengthy recovery, Osmond resumed training in April.
She initially struggled to get her jumps back and return to form, but she won a couple of warm- up competitions during the summer and the Nebelhorn Trophy in Germany for the second time in four years in September.
She suffered a setback in October when she sprained an ankle ligament before the Skate Canada International at Lethbridge, Alta. She then pulled her groin during the short program when she had an awkward fall while doing a spin and ended up in the splits. The injuries prevented her from training properly again until a week before the NHK Trophy event in Japan, yet she said she still managed to do “two decent programs” in the Grand Prix Series event in late November.
Since then, she skated a clean short program in a holiday ice show at West Edmonton Mall and worked with former Canadian and world champion Jeff Buttle on a challenging new exhibition program in December.
“She’s been ready for a couple of weeks,” said Ravi Walia, Osmond’s coach. “She’s really been skating well. ... She’s pretty much where she should be.”
Osmond also recently finished her high school upgrading courses and was excited to receive her high school diploma because it means she now has the option of taking post- secondary courses, possibly in communications or broadcasting.
In addition, she started coaching skaters as young as three in pre-CanSkate and doing private lessons for a couple of preteens on Saturdays.
“Sometimes it actually helps my own skating,” she said. “Teaching other people what to do makes me think of what the technique has to be and then I remember it more.”