Medal hopes remain for Chan
VANCOUVER — If Patrick Chan were to return for another competitive season next year, he would need to move on from counting his Canadian skating championships with his fingers and start with his toes.
Chan, the three-time world champ, was so far ahead of his peers at the nationals that concluded Saturday that he could return from a three-month layoff, be in the middle of changing coaches and moving homes, all while retooling his long program, and still cruise to his 10th Canadian title. Even with a skate that, by his own admission, was not up to his standards.
But, while Chan, 27, said that he “did what he had to do” in the nationals as he prepares for Pyeongchang 2018, what he also showed in Vancouver was that if he does find himself back on an Olympic podium next month, it will be a very different occasion from the last time, when he was the clear favourite in Sochi and stumbled to a silver.
If Chan medals in the men’s event in South Korea, it will instead be the end of a remarkable comeback.
When he stepped away from the sport this past fall after struggling at Skate Canada International in Regina, Chan spoke like someone who was largely defeated in his final season. He acknowledged that his younger rivals, packing their programs with quadruple jumps, had blown past him on a technical level, and he said he been having trouble getting motivated to get out on the ice and do necessary practice work.
After he dumped the rest of the Grand Prix season and moved to Vancouver to be one with nature for a while, Chan says he felt more comfortable, and under the guidance of new coach Ravi Walla he trimmed down the elements in his programs — taking out the tricky quad salchow — and stuck with jumps that he was fully confident he could execute.
He sounded at peace with that this week, aware that if he could skate clean programs, his usual strong artistic scores could give him a shot at an Olympic medal. He would probably still need to see some skaters do a lot of tumbling to give him an opening, but this hasn’t been a season where the men’s field is in top form.
Perhaps surprisingly to casual fans of the sport, though, Chan will be one of Canada’s weaker medal hopes among the skating team that was formally announced on Sunday morning. It will include Gabrielle Daleman, who exited her teenage years in style, wresting the Canadian women’s title from Kaetlyn Osmond with two clean skates, all while battling a case of strep throat that turned into pneumonia symptoms. Osmond had falls in both her short and long programs in Vancouver, but she even with those mistakes she posted one of the highest overall scores among the top women in the world this season. She and Daleman, who finished in the silver-bronze positions at the worlds last year, proved on the weekend that was no fluke. For Daleman, it will be about carrying her momentum from nationals into the Olympics. For Osmond, it will be about finding a way to land the jumps she missed. She said her falls on Friday and Saturday were on jumps she rarely misses in practice, so the problems should not be impossible to fix.
The dance team of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir will again be in contention for the gold medal at Pyeongchang, saying after their seventh Canadian title that they had to fight through their routines on the weekend, but in truth it didn’t look like much of a fight. And in pairs, where Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford won their eighth Canadian championship, the only question about their form comes in the fact that they decided before nationals to return to a long program from two seasons ago. Like Virtue/Moir, there is gold-medal potential in their skates if they perform them cleanly.
But is that there potential for Chan? It was an intriguing question heading into Vancouver, and it’s an intriguing question coming out of it.
Chan said before his free skate on Saturday night, he told himself that he had to trust his training and just let go during the program. “And I did,” he said. But, there were still some mistakes, a slip here and a wobble there. “Now it’s going forward and looking at those little details,” he said.
Noting that not every athlete turns in perfection every time — he mentioned Tom Brady and Michael Jordan specifically — Chan said not every win can be pretty. And while, yes, Brady definitely stunk in the first half of the last Super Bowl, Chan won’t have the luxury of winning ugly in his next competition.
He said earlier in the week that despite his weird and at times listless season, he still held out hope that he could get back to podium form by Pyeongchang. On the evidence of what took place in Vancouver, that hope remains.