Redemption long road Chan ready to travel
The world keeps on spinning, with or without you.
This is no less true in the spinning world of elite figure skating.
Patrick Chan took his leave of it — stepped off the carousel of grinding competition after a heart-crushing silver at the 2014 Olympics. That turned out to be only a one-season hiatus.
But the landscape has changed since Chan was part of it. The restless competitive dimension has shifted.
Eighteen years after tying up his skates for the first time, Chan is no longer the ultra-dominant male specimen on the planet. Indeed, that distinction slipped away in Sochi when the three-time world champion failed to exploit the top podium vacancy left open by a flawed Yuzuru Hanyu free skate.
As Joannie Rochette rather nastily tweeted at the time: “Patrick was handed gold on a silver tray. He took the tray.”
Last week, at the NHK Trophy in Nagano, 20-year-old Hanyu smashed Chan’s record for stratospheric overall mark; obliterated it. His combined score of 322.40 surpassed the Chan benchmark by 27-plus points. His 216.07 free skate mark broke the 200-ceiling no other skater has ever reached, laying Chan’s 196.75 previous high to waste. In the short program, Hanyu shattered his own world record, set in Sochi, by nearly five points.
Two quads cleanly landed in that short, five quads nailed over two nights of competition at the Big Hat.
Chan has some serious catching up to do at the Grand Prix final in Barcelona, which begins Thursday. Yet he claims to be chasing nobody. The 24-year-old Ottawa native, who should have been Canada’s first Olympic men’s champion had the world unfolded as anticipated, has his own path plotted out on the road to the Pyeongchang, his third Winter Games. That road map doesn’t include making dramatic adjustments to the difficulty quotient of the programs he’s taking to Spain.
“I can’t start adding stuff to my program when I haven’t even seen what my total score would be with two successful programs at one event,” Chan insisted during a telephone conference call with reporters. “I don’t think that’s fair — to start revamping my whole program just because of what someone else did as opposed to what I did.”
Yet not long before Hanyu’s magnificent performance in Japan, Chan — who didn’t draw that Grand Prix event — told a reporter that skating fans would be able to size up the Chan vs. Hanyu program dynamics on the GP circuit this season.
“Most people would be ‘Oh, do you take that comment back?’ No, because it’s such a different environment when all three of us, the top men in the world currently, are in one place,’’ said Chan, referring to Spaniard Javier Fernandez as the third member of that crème de la crème troika.
Fernandez and Hanyu both train in Toronto with Brian Orser.
“It changes the energy, it changes the vibe, it changes the dynamic between everybody on the ice,” Chan continued. “And who knows? Maybe even the dynamic between judges and how they feel seeing all three of us on one surface.
“So I’m not going to panic. I’m not going to add anything at the immediate moment. But I’m not at the point in my career where I feel I need to prove to people that I have a lot more in my arsenal. I’m honestly not prepared for it. It’s still very early in the three-year run to the next Olympics.”
This season, in his first major comeback competition, Chan over- took Hanyu to claim gold at Skate Canada. But he unspooled a poor short at his other Grand Prix stop, Trophee Eric Bompard in Bordeaux, where the free skates were cancelled because of the terrorist attacks in Paris.
“I’ll be honest . . . Initially I was kind of relieved that I didn’t have to do a long program,” he admits. “When you’re in those high stress moments, that’s a natural reaction, to just run away from it. I felt I got my runaway.’’
Despite sitting fifth after his short rendition of Mack the Knife, Chan qualified for the Grand Prix final.
Upon further consideration of the abrupt halt to competition in France, Chan now says: “I trained so hard to perform this beautiful program. I really didn’t get a chance to prove that there’s more to my skating than just the short program.’’
That free skate is a typically elegant Chan program performed to Chopard.
But Bompard was an emotional letdown — an “afterthought’’ — even before tragedy struck in Paris because Chan had hit his psychic peak at Skate Canada.
Meanwhile, Hanyu added a second quad to his short program, which presumably should raise the bar for Chan. However, Chan’s not going there, at least not yet.
“There was always talk about ‘What if (Hanyu) did everything, or if he did a clean competition, what kind of marks would he get?’ Now we know. It’s less of a mystery. For me, it kind of calms me down and just makes me realize all right, that’s something that I can reach for, that’s my goal — to aim for that score or beyond it. So it’s good. I feel comfortable and at ease, actually, not so much panicked.’’
Sticking to what he’s got, what he’s shown this season, with its free skate bold quad toe, triple Axel, triple Lutz launch. No second triple Axel, no quad Salchow, which isn’t prime time ready yet.
After the Grand Prix final, Chan will reassess, possibly insert another big jump in time for nationals in January, where he’ll looking to retrieve his crown from teenager Nam Nguyen, yet another Orser disciple.
“Skate Canada is always a good experimental event for adding a little more difficulty. We’ll all play it by ear and see how the (GP) final unfolds. It’s really up in the air.”
As is the remarkable soaring Hanyu — really up there, in the quad air.