CHAN’S POISED FOR PYEONGCHANG
But men’s champ is among Canada’s fainter medal hopes
If Patrick Chan were to return for another competitive season next year, he would need to move on from counting his Canadian skating championships with his fingers and start with the toes.
Chan, the three-time world champ, was so far ahead of his peers at the nationals, which concluded Saturday, that he could return from a three-month layoff, be in the middle of changing coaches and moving homes, all while retooling his long program, and still cruise to his 10th Canadian title — even with a skate that, by his own admission, was not up to his standards.
But while Chan, 27, said he “did what he had to do” in the nationals as he prepares for Pyeongchang 2018, what he also showed in Vancouver was that if he finds himself back on an Olympic podium next month, it will be a very different occasion from the last time, when he was the clear favourite in Sochi and stumbled to a silver.
If Chan medals in the men’s event in South Korea, it will instead be the end of a remarkable comeback.
When he stepped away from the sport this past fall after struggling at Skate Canada International in Regina, Chan spoke like someone who was largely defeated in his final season. He acknowledged his younger rivals, packing their programs with quadruple jumps, had blown past him on a technical level, and he said he had trouble getting motivated to get out on the ice and do the necessary practice work.
After he dumped the rest of the season and moved to Vancouver to be one with nature for a while, Chan said he felt more comfortable. Under the guidance of new coach Ravi Walla he trimmed down the elements in his programs — taking out the tricky quad Salchow — and stuck with jumps he was fully confident he could execute.
He sounded at peace with that this week, aware that if he could skate clean programs, his usual strong artistic scores could give him a shot at an Olympic medal. He would still need to see some skaters do a lot of tumbling to give him an opening, but this hasn’t been a season where the men’s field is in top form.
Perhaps surprisingly to casual fans of the sport, Chan will be one of Canada’s weaker medal hopes among the skating team that was announced on Sunday morning. It will include Gabrielle Daleman, who exited her teenage years in style, wresting the Canadian women’s title from Kaetlyn Osmond with two clean skates, all while battling a case of strep throat. Osmond had falls in both her short and long programs in Vancouver, but even with those mistakes she posted one of the highest overall scores among the top women in the world this season. She and Daleman finished silver and bronze at the worlds last year, and proved on the weekend that was no fluke.
The dance team of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir will again be in contention for gold at Pyeongchang, saying after their seventh Canadian title that they had to fight through their routines on the weekend, but in truth it didn’t look like much of a fight. And in pairs, where Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford won their eighth Canadian championship, the only question comes because they decided before nationals to return to a long program from two seasons ago. Like Virtue and Moir, there is goldmedal potential in their skates if they perform them cleanly.
But is that potential there for Chan? It was an intriguing question heading into Vancouver, and it’s an intriguing question coming out of it.
Chan said before his free skate on Saturday night, he told himself he had to trust his training and let go during the program. “And I did,” he said. But there were some mistakes, a slip here and a wobble there. “Now it’s going forward and looking at those little details,” he said.
Noting that not every athlete turns in perfection every time — he mentioned Tom Brady and Michael Jordan specifically — Chan said not every win can be pretty. And while, yes, Brady definitely stank in the first half of the last Super Bowl, Chan won’t have the luxury of winning ugly in his next competition.