Behind the ice artistry
Gruelling schedules, intense training, costume hassles ... and an uncompromising quest for perfection
BENEATH THE FLASH, beauty and drama of ice dances performed by Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje lie the shared focus and discipline of two young skaters whose partnership began six years ago at the Kitchener-Waterloo Skating Club.
As one of the top four ice dance teams in the world, Weaver and Poje train all day nearly every day at their Michigan base in Bloomfield Hills. They so rarely have time to go home that their families, the Pojes in Waterloo and the Weavers in Texas, spend holidays and Christmas together to maximize their time with their rising stars.
Weaver and Poje narrowly missed being named to Canada’s 2010 Olympic team after placing an unexpected third at national championships, but their 2011 and 2012 seasons were internationally successful and this year promises to maintain their momentum.
In an intense five-week stretch last fall, they competed in three major events, winning gold for a second year at the Ondrej Nepela Memorial Trophy, a senior international competition in Bratislava, Slovakia, where they skated at the rink where Poje’s mother, Tanja, learned to skate.
Over the following four weeks, they picked up bronze medals at two International Skating Union Grand Prix
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BENEATH THE FLASH, beauty and drama of ice dances performed by Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje lie the shared focus and discipline of two young skaters whose partnership began six years ago at the Kitchener-Waterloo Skating Club.
As one of the top four ice dance teams in the world, Weaver and Poje train all day nearly every day at their Michigan base in Bloomfield Hills. They so rarely have time to go home that their families, the Pojes in Waterloo and the Weavers in Texas, spend holidays and Christmas together to maximize their time with their rising stars.
Weaver and Poje narrowly missed being named to Canada’s 2010 Olympic team after placing an unexpected third at national championships, but their 2011 and 2012 seasons were internationally successful and this year promises to maintain their momentum.
In an intense five-week stretch last fall, they competed in three major events, winning gold for a second year at the Ondrej Nepela Memorial Trophy, a senior international competition in Bratislava, Slovakia, where they skated at the rink where Poje’s mother, Tanja, learned to skate.
Over the following four weeks, they picked up bronze medals at two International Skating Union Grand Prix
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>> events — Skate America and the Cup of China — then began gearing up for January’s Canadian championships in Mississauga. The nationals are critical for skaters because performances there help Skate Canada determine who will be assigned to international competitions the following season.
Their immediate goal for 2013 is to join Ontario ice dancers Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue on the podium at the World Figure Skating Championships in London, Ont., in March.
As for two Canadian ice dance teams in the medals at the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, why not?
It’s a hugely exciting time for the pair, who were brought together for a tryout in Waterloo in 2006, when they both were looking for a new partner. Houston-born Weaver was just 17 when she moved to Ontario that August, and she soon applied for Canadian citizenship with the 2010 Olympics in mind. Poje was 19.
After 18 months of training with Paul MacIntosh at the Kitchener-Waterloo Skating Club, they turned to 2003 world ice dance champion Shae-Lynn Bourne for coaching in Toronto.
“She really created us,” Weaver says in a telephone interview from Michigan. “ShaeLynn took us to the next level.”
Good coaches also know when it’s time to let go. A year later, deciding the pair would benefit from a more competitive training environment, Bourne sent them to the husbandand-wife team of Pasquale Camerlengo and Angelika Krylova at the Detroit Skating Club, where they train alongside their French rivals, Nathalie Péchelat and Fabian Bourzat.
“I can’t stress enough how important the group atmosphere there is to us,” Weaver says. “We used to be intimidated by other skaters, even if they weren’t as good as us. Now we’re training with people at our level or even above and it’s very positive; we use that energy to improve and grow. I like the feeling of everyday accomplishment. I thrive on getting closer to our goals.”
Training with competitors isn’t unusual in skating. Elsewhere in Michigan, Virtue and Moir share a coach and skate every day on the same ice as their chief opponents, U.S. ice dance champions Meryl Davis and Charlie White.
Compared to the competition, Weaver and Poje are a relatively new team, particularly in ice dancing where it takes years for a pair to unconsciously match their skating styles so precisely. Virtue/Moir and Davis /White have each skated together for 15 years,
Péchelat and Bourzat for 12 years.
A large team supports Weaver and Poje, including several assistant coaches, choreographers, dancers, musicians, a physiotherapist, nutritionist, physical trainers and costumers. In fine-tuning their programs, they’ve turned to an actor, a flamenco teacher in Madrid, even an acrobat for tips. They experiment with choreography to showcase their versatility and find a winning style for themselves.
This year, the foundation of their long program was choreographed by dancer Allison Holker, a star on So You Think You Can Dance, and polished by head coach Camerlengo. In case of disagreements among the team, Camerlengo rules. Although not involved day to day, Bourne remains their mentor, particularly in the selection of music and choreography.
There is a consistency to their training days. They are on the ice at 7:40 a.m., skating in two sessions before a break for lunch. Two afternoon on-ice sessions are followed by either a dance class, yoga or a gym workout.
In the summer, which is an intense period of learning new short and free dance routines for the following fall and winter competitions, they put in more than eight hours a day at the rink.
Once competition season begins, Poje says they conserve energy by shortening their time on the ice while training at a higher level. Their four-minute free-dance routine is so physically demanding that they skate it start to finish no more than once a day. Run-throughs become even less frequent as an event approaches.
They get steady feedback not only from their coaches, but from judges, TV analysts, even fans in online forums. “We get comments every day,” Weaver says. “We take what we need, leave the rest.”
One opinion she took to heart, from veteran skater Kurt Browning and others, was her need to be physically stronger to keep up with Poje and skate with the deeper edges judges like to see. Weaver is a small-boned five-foot-six-inches, Poje is six-foot-four.
“Andrew is such a powerful skater that my weakness was more noticeable,” she says, but she worked hard to build strength and the effort has been rewarded in their marks.
Outsiders’ views aside, “we’re perfectionists,” she says. “If we’re content, then we’re doing something wrong. There’s never a day when we feel ‘that’s OK.’ ”
“We shouldn’t be feeling OK,” Poje adds. “Our coaches will always snap us back to reality. We couldn’t achieve what we have without them.”
In what little free time they have, they take one online course each semester through the University of Waterloo. Poje is in a biomedical program, Weaver is taking liberal arts. “We use schooling as an outlet for our brains,” Poje says. “We want to continue our education to ensure we have careers after skating. It also gets our minds on something other than the rink.”
Staying healthy is a constant concern. “We’ve had our fair share of injuries,” including a major injury to Weaver’s left shoulder that required surgery, Poje says. “It’s a testament to our off-ice training that we haven’t let an injury get too far.”
They listen to their bodies when it comes to eating. While their diet isn’t rigid, “we’ve attained knowledge of what’s good for us, bad for us,” Poje says.
They pay attention to how they feel after eating different foods, aim for a balance of fat and protein, and rarely indulge themselves by deviating from their normal diet. They are strict about portion control; when they’ve eaten enough, they stop.
At competitions, they don’t eat in the last couple of hours before going on the ice. However, in a holdover from Weaver’s early years of skating, they try to eat one fish dish, preferably salmon, prior to leaving home, or even the night before a competition. If travel and time zone differences mean they can’t sneak it in, they don’t worry. “It’s more a ritual than a superstition,” Poje says. >>
>> One other tradition Weaver follows is to tuck a tiny red ribbon, smaller than a safety pin, inside her costume. She’s been doing that since childhood when her mother first gave her a ribbon in the belief or hope it would protect her daughter from harm.
When they compete, nervousness fades away and other skaters are forgotten once they stand alone on the ice, all eyes on them as they begin to skate. “Connecting to our audience is one of the things we’re blessed with,” Weaver says. “You can’t put a price on the feeling when we finish our program and we hear the applause and the standing ovation.”
The chemistry Weaver and Poje exude on the ice reaches the rafters, unmatched by the other top ice dance teams. Audiences love seeing skaters so absorbed in each other and are disappointed if that impact doesn’t seem to be recognized in the scores. However, Weaver doesn’t agree that judges dismiss the importance of on-ice connection: “The judges are watching, same as the audience, and judges are human; they just have a little more power. They feel it, too, but the technical score is so important. Tessa and Scott can do both, and we put it together by the end of last year, too.”
Indeed, the biggest challenge for Weaver and Poje is not pulling off a spectacular lift or a fast series of perfectly synchronized twizzles. “The most difficult is combining technical difficulty with artistry,” Weaver says. “It’s easy to do the steps robotically and achieve high levels (marks), but with no feeling or emotion. Adding in a story makes it harder; being technically sound with feet and body plus emotion. When the two become one, it adds a new maturity, a new look to the program.”
Whether a dance routine is playful or poignant, their on-ice elegance is enhanced by their choice of costume. They have engaged a number of different designers, including an assistant designer from the television blockbuster, Mad Men, this year. One year, they turned to the maker of ballroom gowns for a design. Their costumes are custom-made, using high- quality fabrics. If sparkle is called for, it’s provided by Swarovski crystals.
Almost every costume has a story, and what looks good on paper isn’t always easy to skate in. After seeing a tiger-patterned dress on Dancing With the Stars, Weaver wanted one, too, and their 2011 short dance seemed just the right vehicle for it. But the long, beaded fringe on the sleeves and skirt weighed about five pounds — “like weight-training while skating,” she says — and much of it had to be cut off.
Her 2011 free-dance costume was a silky, deceptively simple dark red slip dress, cut and sewed with one shoulder strap falling down her upper arm. The slipping strap was the designer’s way of emphasizing an air of intimacy and vulnerability in their Je Suis Malade dance. “I liked it,” Weaver says, “but everyone had something to say about it; they either liked it or hated it.”
In 2010, dancing to Etta James’ bluesy rendition of At Last, Weaver competed in a black dress she’d first worn at the age of 13. The dress that had been designed for the dance shed feathers every time she skated, annoying the judges. With no time to make a new costume, she turned to the Breakfast at Tiffany’s- inspired dress in her closet. With a band of crystals around the high neck, it became an outstanding choice.
In this season’s first two competitions, Weaver was wearing another substitute dress for their short program because her costume wasn’t ready. For the long program, in which she plays a statue brought to life, her one - piece, alaba stercoloured costume required extra work because the tights kept slipping down. Andrew’s suit had to be returned to Russia for alterations and wasn’t back in time for Skate America.
Music is another vital element of ice dance. If the choice is right, it helps set a mood and draw in the audience. Whether it’s familiar to viewers is less important than if the skaters themselves are attached to it. The music has to “stick in our heads,” Weaver says.
All this attention to detail takes money.
Skate Canada, the world’s largest governing body in figure skating, supports its top-tier skaters, but “it’s hard for a sport as expensive as ours to create enough funding,” Poje says. “Skate Canada does provide funding to the best of their ability, but it falls short of what we need. We have to find funds elsewhere. If it means finding sponsors or doing skating shows, we do that so we don’t have to sacrifice the training we need.”
In 2012, for the first time, Weaver and Poje joined the top-notch Stars on Ice Canada tour after the competition season ended in March. It meant giving up most of their annual off-ice break, reducing last year’s vacation to five days in Mexico sandwiched between the final Stars on Ice show in Vancouver and Skate Canada’s annual meeting.
“We started preparing the next season’s programs a little behind our competitors, and we had to go in hyper-drive to catch up, but it was definitely worth it to grow in professionalism and efficiency,” Weaver says of Stars on Ice . “It was such an amazing experience to take our programs to people across Canada, and it was a dream come true for both of us to work with Kurt Browning.”
Given their enthusiasm and dedication, it seems almost unfair to ask if they ever have a down day. “Of course,” says Weaver, unfazed by the question. “It’s a normal human reaction. Fortunately, we know when the other one is feeling discouraged, and we know each other so well that we know how to get the other one back on track.”
Bill Poje, Andrew’s father and a longtime figure skating volunteer, says his wife thinks of Weaver as a second daughter. “We train so long on ice plus our off-ice regimens that our families become involved in each other’s lives,” Andrew explained. “We’re not two separate lives. We’ve become one extended family.”
Given such close family ties, the pair’s on-ice charisma and the togetherness of sharing a home in Michigan, surely romance is part of the picture. But Weaver says no.
Reminded of how they look as they skate in each other’s arms, she says simply, “That’s our job — to tell stories on the ice.”