Chan not the man in team opener
SOCHI, Russia
So the three-time and reigning world champion from Canada was beaten by the 31-year-old Russian geriatric.
But despite that unhappy headline, Thursday turned out to be a pretty good night for Team Canada — and not as bad a one for Patrick Chan as it must have felt after he skated.
Thanks to the Canadian-champion pairs team of Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford, who skated their hearts out to place second, Chan’s substandard performance, third behind Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu and the evergreen Evgeni Plushenko, didn’t put his teammates in too big a hole.
In the debut of the 10-nation Olympic team figure skating event, actual scores don’t count, only placements, so Canada is still right there after Day 1 — two points behind Russia, two ahead of China — with threequarters of the event still to be skated Saturday and Sunday.
“Before we went on the ice, I was backstage with Patrick, and he kind of shook my hand and said, ‘OK, I’m passing the baton to you guys,’” said Radford, “so we’re in a bit of a relay right now.”
They’ll pass their baton to the No. 2 couple, Kirsten Moore-Towers and Dylan Moscovitch, for the free skate on Saturday evening, when the pairs will be the first discipline to finish.
Chan will give way to Kevin Reynolds for the men’s long on Sunday. The short programs in dance, with Olympic champions Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, and women’s, with Kaetlyn Osmond, go Saturday. Osmond and the dancers will skate both short and long programs, as only two total substitutions are allowed per country.
Hanyu, the young ISU Grand Prix champion who already had the record high score for a short program, reinforced his season-long superiority over Chan with a very solid skate that featured a big triple Axel and a quad and more than enough of the details favoured by the modern scoring system to finish first on the evening.
He was tickled to have outscored his childhood idol not Chan, the other guy.
“Plushenko, to me, is a hero, and it felt great just to take to the same ice as him,” said Brian Orser’s prize student.
Chan, who has performed unevenly under pressure the past couple of years, looked nervous before he started or, anyway, intense.
A loose landing on the front end of a planned quad-triple combination meant the best he could salvage was a double on the end of it, and his approach to the always-troublesome triple Axel was too slow and he staggered out of that landing.
So he was firmly behind the eight ball by the time he could let his feet do the talking in the second half of the program. It doesn’t have to be fatal to the team’s chances, but Chan’s own opportunity for redemption won’t come Sunday. He’ll have to wait until the individual event next week.
“It feels good to be able to hand it off (to Reynolds),” Chan said.
“Come the 13th (the men’s singles short program), I won’t want to hand it off, of course. But in a way, I’m glad I did that here. It was good to get the jitters out.”