Buttle: In quad we trust
Talented Canadian believes mastery of difficult jump key to becoming Olympic champion in Turin He’s been watching videos of skaters with similar styles who have had success, by Randy Starkman
BARRIE— The large banner hovers prominently in the background as Jeffrey Buttle gracefully glides around the ice on a recent afternoon — “ You are now in Quadruple country.”
“ Not today, it’s not,” he earlier laughed ruefully.
It’s not like Buttle needs any reminders of the exceedingly difficult jump he must master to have any hope of becoming the Olympic men’s figure skating champion in February in Turin, Italy. The manoeuvre has been the bane of his career as a skater. He is lauded for his choreography, footwork and musicality.
Still, when the talk turns to Buttle’s Olympic prospects, it always comes with that qualifier, “ If he can only get that quad . . .” The just turned 23- year-old won silver behind Switzerland’s Stephane Lambiel at last year’s world championships in Moscow without a quad, despite falling twice, because of his artistic superiority and his faltering rivals, including favourite Evgeni Plushenko of Russia, who pulled out with a groin injury. But it left Buttle wondering what might have been.
“ Instead of thinking I got the silver without it, I thought I could win the gold with it,” he said.
“ I looked at the scores and Stephane made a few mistakes and had I done better and had I had a quad, I would be the world champion right now.
“ I think that’s sort of something that stays there in my mind.” The self- proclaimed moniker “ Quadruple country” at Allandale Recreation Centre is for the likes of Elvis Stojko and Takeshi Honda of Japan — the former trained there for most of his career; the latter still does — but Buttle has yet to have his passport stamped. He was using a recent afternoon session to work on a runthrough of his new long program, a tribute to Glenn Gould, as part of his preparation for an invitational event in Japan later this month. The native of Smooth Rock Falls, Ont., flashed the form that has stamped him an original in a sport of often cardboard cutouts, but missed all four of his quad- toe attempts.
“ I haven’t been great actually,” Buttle admits. “ I still feel like I’m tweaking it a bit and trying to get the proper technique.
“ It’s just I guess I’ll have to give it the time it needs and be patient with it.”
Like most of his peers, he is also paying a physical price for practising the demanding jump. He couldn’t try it for two weeks after injuring his ankle while attempting a quad at his other training base in Arrowhead, Calif. earlier this summer. On this day, he skips one of three on- ice sessions to get his hip treated by a physiotherapist.
Buttle has started watching videos of other skaters with similar jumping styles to his who have had success with the quad. Among his tutors are Olympic champions Alexei Yagudin and Ilia Kulik, fellow Russian Alexander Abt and American Timothy Goebel. The quad happens in a blur. A skater reaches a speed approaching 20 m. p. h., launches himself with the toe of his left skate and completes four revolutions in 0.5 to 0.7 seconds. The best practitioners of it, like Goebel, say, “ You need to just let your body do it.”
That’s exactly the advice Buttle got from Canadian skating legend and four-time world champion Kurt Browning, the first man to land a quad at the worlds, when they travelled together on the Stars On Ice tour this year.
“ You just go back and watch him do his quad toe and it looked like he was doing the triple,” he said.
“ He didn’t give it any extra attention.
“That’s something I’ve been trying to work on, just trying to
relax about it.”
There’s been some
debate on the figure
skating websites about
whether Buttle should
attempt the quad at all
this season given his
lack of success with it
and his ability to compete well without it last year when he was also second at the Grand Prix Final. But he feels the pressure is on him to go for it.
“ It’s a lot of things,” he said.
“ I know that my competitors have it, so there’s that pressure to be able to match up with them.
“ And I know there’s a bit of pressure from . . . I’m not saying there’s a lot of pressure on us from the federation to be doing well this year, but whether or not they vocalize it, you feel it.
“ But I’ve learned to deal with that because it’s usually been myself that’s been the hardest. Again the one that I can control is myself.
“ So if I can ease up a bit on putting pressure on myself, I think it will help sort of relax, get that weight off my shoulders and maybe help me do it.”