Risky moves might pair well with gold
In figure skating, timing is everything.
A split second wrong on the takeoff of a jump or a throw and the skater ends up splattered on the landing — as Meagan Duhamel thrice tumbled to the ice in the long program at Autumn Classic in September, an overture competition for the 2017-18 season. More on that shortly.
But there is also the other kind of timing, orchestrated so that athletes hit maximum performance readiness at the big events on the schedule. It’s that moment when they hum.
In the Olympic quadrennial, Duhamel and partner Eric Radford may have lost their optimum traction.
They were arguably too good too soon after placing seventh in Sochi — back-to-back world championships in 2015 and 2016 further burnishing Canada’s historical reputation in pairs. It’s hard staying at the top. Frankly, judges get tired of the same old faces. Lustre wears off. And striving to push the envelope — tougher tricks, ever-more challenging programs — tempts hubris.
Last year at worlds, Duhamel and Radford plummeted back down to seventh, first time in four years they’d been off the podium anywhere. True, Radford skated with a herniated disk in his back that caused numbness and loss of control in his right him. It was a gutsy performance. But Duhamel afterwards admitted Radford’s injury wasn’t solely to blame. They’d struggled all year.
“Our poor results and poor skates were because we didn’t deliver,” she stated bluntly over the summer. “It’s our own fault.’’
And so the duo took the drastic step — less than a year out from the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang — of firing their co-coach, Richard Gauthier, part of a major team shakeup. Kept on board was the other coach, Bruno Marcotte, who also happens to be Duhamel’s husband. They relocated their training base to Montreal, conscripted the aid of a new consultant coach in Florida-based John Zimmerman, hired John Kerr to create this season’s programs alongside choreographer Julie Marcotte, Bruno’s sister.
“(Zimmerman) was another pair of eyes and a totally different sort of input to help us improve we haven’t tried before,” explains Radford in advance of Skate Canada, which begins in Regina on Friday. “We’ve been with the same coaching staff for pretty much our whole careers. We decided to use a different choreographer this season and I think bring John Zimmerman in, in that same sort of way, to reinvigorate and to stimulate our skating from a different place.”
This will presumably be their final Games — Duhamel is 31, Radford 32 — and last shot at Olympic gold. A team which had expanded the boundaries of athleticism in pairs skating — incorporating the rare throw triple Axel that took hundreds of hours to train, then ditching it because the technical marks they were given didn’t justify the risk — is desperately seeking rejuvenation.
Zimmerman polished their skating skills while Kerr infused them with fresh ideas.
“He brought a dimension to skating that we hadn’t really explored as much before,” says Radford. “He’s very in tune with the expression side of choreography. There was an amazing synergy between him and Judy, between the four of us really.”
But swapping out what worked for many years is also risky.
The outcome at Autumn Classic in Montreal, a tune-up tier below the Grand Prix circuit where they placed third in the free skate with that botched routine, was alarming. Back to the drawing board for the “With or Without You” program.
“We had to make those types of mistakes to figure out the way things really needed to be,” says Radford.
Significantly, they changed the element order, sticking the throw quad in earlier to avoid attempting the manoeuvre while fatigued. Previously that quad followed a lift in the corner of the ice, which made it feel almost claustrophobic. “It was just a lot more difficult than I thought it would be, being tired,” the endlessly energetic Duhamel acknowledges. “Not only did I fall on the quad at Autumn Classic, we’ve never landed it at home either.”
Suddenly the pace of the entire routine shifted. For the first time, less than two weeks ago, they skated it cleanly at practice. Such a radically different feeling from their instantly simpatico short program, which came easy and breezing from the get-go.
“We really tried to inject what we had been working so strongly on in the short into the long program,” says Radford. “The first part of figure skating is that you’ve got to do the elements so that the second mark (presentation, artistry) can shine through.
“We got a little lopsided trying to really push the artistic side. We kind of assumed, well, all the technical elements are going to work. A small difference between the long and the short program is that in the long program, it’s more about just that sort of raw energy rather than the special introverted moment that can exist between me and Meagan. That connection is still there, but with the changes we’ve made it’s still going to come through, but in a totally different sort of colour than the short program.”
These are nuances of figure skating — which is both sport and artistry — that may not be grasped by a general audience. But the overall package, they hope, will resonate with judges.
The long program kinks were resolved during a fortnight of training and doing shows in Italy. They had debated whether to stick with the show schedule, but of course they were contracted, so they brought Julie Marcotte along to help recalibrate.
“After that terrible long program, Saturday night at Autumn Classic, we were leaving Sunday for Italy,” recalls Duhamel. “We sat with our coaches and with Julie for hours. Can we get a new long? Can we fix this long? We even called John Kerr and asked if he could come to Italy.
“We were having a bit of a panic mode. But in the end we decided not to scrap the long altogether, to make it work, and things kind of calmed down. It’s almost like we had hit the reset button.”
That sense of, whew, all’s well again, followed them home to Montreal. “We probably had one of our most spectacular weeks of training last week,” says Duhamel. “Every program we ran was basically clean. We weren’t exhausted. We had this energy and excitement about what we were creating.”
The litmus test will be Skate Canada, followed by Skate America in late November — their two Grand Prix assignments before the final in Japan. They’ve won Skate Canada three times, the GP final once, the national championship six years running.
It really is only about the Olympics now.