Duhamel, Radford pushing themselves

Canadian pair without parallel add to challenge with throw triple Axel

Lesson learned: Don’t count your bling before it’s snatched.

That was the admonition — a selfrebuke — that Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford took away from the Grand Prix final 11 months ago.

For the entire previous season, the five-time Canadian pairs champions had been untouchable on the ice, from the Grand Prix circuit to the world championships. Gold was almost taken for granted, if not necessarily by them. Then — boop — they were ignominiously dumped into silver at Barcelona behind a Russian duo.

Duhamel and Radford took that “loss” to heart, used it to burnish their bona fides as “underdogs’’ at the worlds in April, and racked up their second consecutive global title.

Now, as the 2016-17 Grand Prix calendar launches with their first assignment of the season at Skate Canada, it’s about taking nothing for granted, ever. Even if they’re not that comfortable being the pursued.

“One of the things we learned is that it doesn’t matter what happens throughout the season,” Duhamel was saying on Friday, after she and Radford placed first in the short competition, almost 10 points clear of China’s Xiaoyu Yu and Hao Zhang. “When you get to the big events, like the world championships, whoever skates the best is going to come out on top.

“Last season, every competition we went to, we were defending a title because we had been undefeated the season before. And that was brand new to us. Right now, compared to last season in October, we’re more focused on Meagan and Eric. What can Meagan and Eric do to become a better version of ourselves? That’s really what pushes us every day.”

Apart from talking about oneself in the third person . . .

Pushing themselves and the envelope means adding a throw triple Axel to their short program — because nobody else is doing it. They pulled it off competently yesterday, though Duhamel had to dig deep to hold her landing edge.

That rare Axel throw was the couple’s bird-flip to rules that forbid quad throws in the short, which is frustrating to a tandem unparalleled in technical proficiency.

Duhamel: “We thought, ‘OK now, how can we increase our base value of the short without a quad? We already do the hardest jump. The only way was to learn the hardest throw triple which is the triple Axel.”

Radford: “If we were just to do the same elements year after year, it would get boring.”

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