Ice shifts beneath Chan’s blades
Jumps still haunt top Canadian with Olympics on horizon
On the confidence spectrum, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir are on opposite ends from Patrick Chan.
All three are gifted and highly decorated figure skaters on a very strong Canadian team.
But while Virtue and Moir, ice dancers extraordinaire, are gliding serenely toward their third Olympics, racking up world-record scores en route, Chan is practically providing a pre-emptive excuse for failure.
The three-time world champion, silver at Sochi, has scaled back the technical difficulty of his programs for Skate Canada International, the Grand Prix tour stop which begins Friday in Regina. He’s dropped a second quad from his short routine and axed the quad Salchow entirely from the long, leaving two quad toe loops in.
By way of comparison, teenager Nathan Chen landed five quads in a single routine at the 2017 American championships and four in the long to win the Rostelecom Cup in Moscow last weekend
Chen was hardly a speck on the horizon when Chan was the most dominant male figure skater on the planet — until he was out-gutted by Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu in Sochi. That outcome was psychologically searing for Chan, a primary motive behind both his 18-month timeout from competition and the comeback he afterwards mounted.
But the landscape changed drastically during Chan’s absence. A new generation of men has gone quad crazy. And while not as beautifully exemplifying the other components of the sport — artistry, fine lines, footwork deftness — they’ve surpassed Chan in quad. He hasn’t caught up.
That reality was brought home with a thump at a recent runthrough of his short program to “Dust in the Wind” when he fell on the opening quad toe, the squad Salchow and again on the triple Axel.
“At that point I threw my hands up in the air and I was like, ‘At this point, I don’t even want to complete the footwork sequence,’ which I love personally — it’s the favourite part of my program,” Chan said in a conference call ahead of Skate Canada. “But because of the mistakes, I had no desire to keep going. And because of the frustration that had built up over time, that was kind of the last straw that broke the camel’s back.”
It is jarring to hear Chan — who turns 27 on Dec. 31 — talk like this, where once upon a time his selfconfidence was without bounds.
Although he candidly admits the jumping was never his favourite part. The work put in was arduous, didn’t flow naturally from his expressive talents.
“I’m not a technical genius when it comes to jumps. I’ve done what I needed to do to get to the top, during my prime days. I accomplished that. So for me to try and compete with the others, adding a quad flip or a quad Lutz, I don’t enjoy that. And at the end of the day, I continue to push myself into the 2018 Games and my third Games because I want to enjoy it, and I need to have a realistic goal in order to enjoy it.”
It’s still possible that Chan will reinsert the gone-quads before Pyeongchang, perhaps — if unlikely — at Canadians in January, a title he’s claimed nine times. But the bottom line is that Chan, when merely contemplating the long list of to-dos in his “Hallelujah” free skate, felt staggered. “I kept thinking ahead to the moment where I had to be standing on the ice, and how do I feel in my current situation, standing there? And I didn’t feel very confident. I felt . . . more a feeling of fear, and not having the confidence to attack.
“I just found myself being very, very unhappy every time I would start the program, just look at the list of jumps that I had to complete. It was very, very overwhelming for me.”
So now contentment is the purported objective; feeling joy instead of dejection.
But happiness isn’t why elite athletes compete. Settling for an amorphous sense of self-gratification is another way of saying: I’m okay about losing. Which makes the past two-plus years a waste of Chan’s time.
“I’m going to focus on the quality of my program . . . more what I want to do and what I love about skating.
“I decided I would stick to my old guns and my old tricks, do what I can do at the very best and see where the chips land.”
Those are soft aspirations, amidst competitive gusts that have left Chan windburned.
Virtue and Muir are skating with the wind at their backs.
They too took a furlough after gold in Sochi, after triumph at the Vancouver Games. But they returned with a vengeance, copping world laurels in Helsinki and the elusive Grand Prix title last December. Like Chan, they shifted their training base and put themselves in the reliable coaching hands of Marie-France Dubreuil and Patrice Lauzon in Montreal. Every step forward has boosted their selfassurance.
“There is a strange sense of calm that we feel in our training,” says Virtue. “Of course our nerves are there, the pressure is there, we know that the anxiety will come. We’re expecting it and ready to embrace it because that’s in large part why we want to compete again. We also feel we’re right where we should be in a lot of ways.”
So focused were the duo on the ultimate prize in an Olympic season that they passed on show tours — a financial mainstay — over the summer, going directly into the training regimen, with a sideways psychological boost uplift from Olympic rower Marnie McBean, a longtime mentor.
“We were able to talk about what a third Olympic cycle feels like with her,” says Virtue. “And it’s still magical and it’s exhilarating and it’s still enlightening.”
Following an Olympic summit session in Calgary, they felt an even stronger sense of purpose and validation.
Two decades in the game and it still feels fresh.
They adore their new programs. The free dance is performed to the soundtrack from “Moulin Rouge,” featuring their trademark innovative choreography.
“It’s a complex storyline with what we’re trying to show,” explains Muir, of the program that debuted to winning approval at Autumn Clas- sic. “We’ve got some great technical work to improve the speed and the flow. The pressure is on us to execute it because we feel we’ve taken some big steps forward in the last three weeks. We’re hoping to showcase that in Regina.”
The short routine is designed for immense fan appeal, built around music from the Rolling Stones, the Eagles and Carlos Santana, songs that were hits long before they were born, the days of vinyl albums.
Ice dance, of course, swings wildly between old chestnut soundtracks, opera and contemporary music which often doesn’t translate well onto the ice.
“We’re both kind of old souls, especially when it comes to music,” laughs Virtue. “So it’s not all that surprising that we connect to music from that generation. It’s important, especially, in a sport like figure skating, to bridge the gap and bring as many people into the performance with us as possible.”
Well, “Sympathy for the Devil” on ice may be a first.
“Gangsta’s Paradise”, however, they’re restricting to Carpool Karaoke.
“There’s a leaked video that will come out one day, my music video to it,” laughs Muir. “You’ll see.”