Where you from? Sometimes, skaters have surprise answer

There’s a Russian skating for Australia who at first thought she was headed to Austria. Two Americans are ice dancing for host South Korea. Another American is competing for Brazil. Four members of the Israeli team are not natives. The German pair that won the gold medal has a woman, Aliona Savchenko, from Ukraine, and a man, Bruno Massot, from France. And get this: a Brit and an Aussie are entered in ice dance representing the Russians, who once ruled that discipline. Some three dozen skaters in the Pyeongchang Games are performing for nations in which they were not born. Spain’s Sara Hurtado had success with a previous ice dance partner. When they split, like many ice dancers of the last few decades, she found a new partner in Russia, Kirill Khaliavin. Such pairings often fail because the level of performance doesn’t match for each skater. Yet it worked immediately for them. “We had the same vision about achieving things. And we bonded more as a team because of that than because of the technical (moves). We shared a mindset,” Hurtado said. What many of the couples don’t share is a language, and that often causes extra problems: communicating on the ice, strategizing and dealing with coaches. Some nations require athletes to speak the language. Yura Min and Alexander Gamelin skate for South Korea. She is from California, he is from Long Island, though she has Korean roots and has represented the country since 2013. For them to team, Gamelin had to learn Korean, memorize the national anthem, and pass a citizenship interview. “I’ve been studying since we got together,” he says, noting it took 1 ½ years before he was ready for the citizenship test. “I understand it more than I speak it.”