CHAN’S MISSED CHANCE
With a prime chance for gold, Chan stumbles in long program
Brian Orser knew the question was coming.
About that curse, the one that now has Canada’s scorecard reading 14 men’s world titles, zero Olympic gold medals.
Except this one was nothing like Orser’s silver in Calgary, 26 years ago. That night, he and the man who beat him, American Brian Boitano, both skated brilliantly, into a virtual tie broken only by minutiae.
Friday night at the Iceberg Skating Palace, with the door left wide open ahead of him by Orser’s teenage student, Japan’s Yuzuru Hanyu, Patrick Chan patted his pockets to make sure his three consecutive world championships were still there, skated right up to that door full of determination, and let a strong breeze blow it shut in his face.
No one should win an Olympic title without performing a great skate, but Hanyu did, because in his moment of truth, the 23-yearold Chan let the gold medal bleed away in a confounding series of small errors — all of them adding up to much the same four-pointsplus deficit he had faced after Thursday’s short program.
So silver, then. Again. Like Orser’s two, in 1984 and ’ 88. Like Elvis Stojko’s pair in 1994 and ’ 98.
Kazakhstan’s Denis Ten came from ninth place to claim bronze.
Chan had opened up with a beautiful quad-triple combination, which pretty much eliminated the lead Hanyu had taken into the night.
He put a hand down to save his second quad, but he was still in great shape until his bete noire, the triple Axel, bit him again.
Then he doubled the second half of a scheduled triple-triple combination, stumbled out of a double Axel, hurried his closing spin and finished a tick behind his music.
“Feeling the medal slip away was definitely a lingering thought,” Chan said. “I’m disappointed, but life goes on. We’re all human. Even (snowboard legend) Shaun White makes mistakes. Unfortunately, I made one too many.”
Hanyu had skated poorly, and owned it.
“Oh my God. I’m so surprised. It was such a difficult program for me and I felt rough, physically. I’m just shocked,” said the 19-year-old, who became his country’s first-ever men’s gold medallist. “I’m upset with the performance I had, but I left everything I had out there.
For Orser, it was a night of
‘I’m disappointed, but life goes on. We’re all human. Even (snowboard legend) Shaun White makes mistakes. Unfortunately, I made one too many.’
PATRICK CHAN
Canadian figure skater
mixed feelings.
“I absolutely feel for Patrick. Of course. It is bittersweet. Because I wanted them all to skate great and if they did that and Patrick was on top, then we finally had a Canadian that was Olympic champion, and I could take a lot of pride in that,” he said.
“I wanted it to be one those nights where everybody is amazing, starting with (his Spanish skater Javier) Fernandez and then Yuzuru and then Chan, and they all put it out there and you don’t know what’s going to happen and you leave it in the hands of the judges’ panel. “But the magic didn’t happen.” Chan holds the world record long program score, 196.75. He only needed to score 182.57 to overtake Hanyu. He fell 4.47 short.
Asked if he believed in the Canadian curse, Orser groaned.
“No, I don’t believe in a curse. I don’t know what to say. Because you know, Patrick’s a great guy, too. But it’s about them performing their best, and we saw that (Thursday night) with Yuzuru, he had one of those magical nights, and he had a nice little cushion in the short.”
“It wasn’t anybody’s best night,” said Chan’s coach, Kathy Johnson. “It certainly wasn’t the skate we usually see from Patrick, but in the moment, it happens.
“He definitely knew the door was open, because when you go out you see the scores and you can tell from the score that something didn’t go the way (Hanyu) wanted it to go.”
“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?” said Skate Canada’s high performance director, Mike Slipchuk. “If anything, I feel for Patrick. Our hearts go out to him. I’ve been through this with four of our men, just in my career. We’re a bit snake-bitten, it seems, when it gets to the Games.”
Any time this happens, Slipchuk said, it’s a lot harder on the athlete than it will ever be on us.
You kind of hope, after the disappointment passes, that Canada remembers that.
It took much too long to get over Orser’s loss, to stop blaming him.
“The Games are an important part of a career, but they’re not a defining moment,” Slipchuk said.
“It’s sport. You hope it all goes perfect, but it was an odd night of skating. Sometimes it just snowballs in the opposite direction.”