BROWNING KNOWS OLYMPIC PRESSURE
Current generation of skaters vying for spot in South Korea
The first time Kurt Browning made the Olympic team, he cried. But not for the reasons you might think.
It was 1988 and Browning, just 21, finished second at the Canadian nationals in Victoria to secure his spot at the Calgary Games. But one of his closest friends, Mike Slipchuk, struggled at the nationals and wouldn’t make the cut.
Browning says he went back to his hotel room and stayed in instead of celebrating.
“I just remember my parents staring at me as I was crying on my bed,” he says.
“It was like, ‘What is wrong with this kid?’”
Later, says the four-time world and Canadian champion, Browning realized the “very, very emotional night” was a result of a lot of things: the sadness of what happened with Slipchuk — who did make the Olympics in 1992 and is now Skate Canada’s highperformance director — and his own happiness, and a whole lot of release. So much had gone into making the Olympics, now he had done it, and, well, he was a bit of a mess.
A national championship is always a big deal to a competitive figure skater, but every four years it is a whole different level of daunting. Such is the case this week in Vancouver, when Canada will send out a mix of sure things just looking to lock down their spots and a pile of younger skaters who will compete to fill out the roster for PyeongChang 2018.
Browning has been at both ends. When he first made the Olympic team, he wasn’t thinking about a medal.
“I wasn’t thinking about how I was getting home from the event,” he says over the phone from Toronto, where on Tuesday he was formally named one of CBC’s figure skating analysts for the PyeongChang Games next month. “It was just, ‘Is this amazing thing going to happen?’”
Such will be the case for the men like Nicolas Nadeau and Keegan Messing trying to make the team behind Patrick Chan, who has to recover from a disastrous outing at Skate Canada International in Regina in October, where he crashed to a fourthplace finish. The younger skaters should have quite a battle for that second spot, assuming Chan is back in his world-class form.
But even for established veterans like Kaetlyn Osmond and Gabrielle Daleman, who last year became the first Canadian women to share a podium at the world championship, and world champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir (dance) and Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford (pairs), the nationals are a significant step on the way to the Olympics, even if those stars don’t have to brawl for their spots.
“It’s about whatever you are lugging around in your brain for the next month,” Browning says.
It’s a chance to nail down the final details of a routine, to perform it on a big stage, and to gain the confidence of an assured performance with less than a month until South Korea. Or to do the opposite, as happened with Chan in Regina.
The three-time world champion and silver medallist at Sochi 2014 fell on his first quad attempt, fell again on a triple Axel and downgraded several other jumps. He then withdrew from the Grand Prix event in Japan, which means the nationals will be his final chance to salvage what will be his last competitive season.
Chan said in Regina he had struggled to push himself in his final season, but he said during a promotional stop in Toronto last month that a move to Vancouver boosted his training.
Browning had his own experiences with untimely falls that kept him off the Olympic podium in his stellar career. You just have to have the jumps, he says, and then the idea “is to win it with all that other stuff.”
This is what makes Chan the most intriguing story this week: he acknowledges he doesn’t have the jump-packed routines of Japan’s Shoma Uno and Yuzuru Hanyu or Nathan Chen of the United States, so his margin of error is that much smaller.
But Browning also says he isn’t writing off Canada’s best hope against the army of jumping machines.
“It’s still Patrick Chan, for crying out loud.”