Top pair goes with the flow, minus throw
It is a creature rarely spotted in the captivity of competition: The throw triple Axel.
Only a handful of figure skating pairs have ever featured it; fewer have landed the thing cleanly.
Not without regret, Meagan Duhamel and Eric Radford are singing the bye-bye-blues to theirs. For now, at least. For their “killer” short program. For this week’s Canadian figure skating championships in Ottawa.
The risk simply isn’t worth the rewards, they agreed.
Although, in a social media world, the couple first felt out the pulse of their fans.
“I was curious to get people’s opinion,” says Duhamel. “I put a video up on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. Because, to be honest, it was a little heartbreaking to admit that we should remove the triple Axel.’’
In her polling question, Duhamel emphasized the narrow difference in base score value between the Axel manoeuvre and the throw triple Lutz which has replaced it: 7.7 for the former, 5.5 for the latter. But grade of execution points — how well (or poorly) an element is executed — favours the Lutz. “The throw triple Lutz we can do with our eyes closed, while the throw triple Axel took a lot of work to learn and master. Maybe this is something that hopefully will be changed in the future — the value of throws will start to receive the credit that they deserve.”
That Axel throw was never in the long program.
It’s probably all too inside baseball for the casual figure skating fan to appreciate. But the awkwardness that ensued from uncorking that big throw Axel — which they only began performing competitively this past season — caused a visible wrench in the esthetics of their short routine. So out it went, with the Lutz launched off a more musically in- tegrated transition.
“That’s kind of changed the entire structure and flow of the middle portion of the short program,’’ explains Radford. “We have a lot more speed. We cover a lot more ice. And I think the entire expression of the short program will be changed because the triple Axel was extremely difficult and created a little bit of a cut in the energy and flow of the program, even when we landed it. You could tell that something big was coming up.’’
A botched thrown triple Axel, further, was impossible to fix on the fly. It showed its faults, usually by Duhamel falling off her landing edge or two-footing it.
In fact, Duhamel claims the Axel is easier to pull off cleanly, or such has been the case in practice, which of course doesn’t count for a hill of beans. “But in competition, with the adrenalin, it was starting to go wonky.’’
Thus, after introducing the trick with much fanfare, it’s been binned.
Program alterations, short and long, didn’t stop there, not when the two-time and reigning world champions returned from last month’s Grand Prix final with a disappointing bronze behind the Russians and the Chinese.
The long program — to “Non, je ne regrette rien’’ — underwent a significant overhaul in the order of elements, again to promote fluidity. Because this is a team highly proficient in the technical demands of elite performance.
“One of the things we did with both programs was we changed our setup to the twist,’’ says Duhamel.
An entirely pragmatic decision intended to rack up points, lifting the twist to level-four difficulty where they’d been receiving a trail of level threes.
“We changed our steps going into it to ensure that it will be a level four,” says Duhamel, although the rigid techno-orthodoxy of the post-6.0 scoring system — count-hold-count — has displeased many observers. “The quality of our twist has improved with it because the quality and the speed lends itself to a move effortless twist.’’
They figure, in the second half of the 2016-17 season, that will earn them an extra point in both the short and the long. It is, alas, all about the minutiae of the math.
As well, in the long, the team has rearranged the placing and composition of jump sequences, ditching a triple-toe double-toe double-toe combination, inserting a triple Lutz double-toe into side-by-side triple Salchows.
“We want to see how this is going to work, what types of points we’re going to get,” continues Duhamel on the reconstituted program to be unveiled in Ottawa. “I think when we land a side-by-side triple Sal, we both have a really good quality to our triple Sal. I think that’s going to bring a better (grade of execution) and the Sal flows into and out very nicely with the music and the choreography.”
These are factors of crucial importance to a pairs tandem that, while intensely athletic, hasn’t always been fairly rewarded on the sheer look of their partnership. They don’t have long, elegant lines and a graceful presentation. That’s simply not their strength. And figure skating, a vain sport, is often about the look of things.
That’s the nitty-gritty of what to expect in Ottawa. In the bigger picture, Duhamel and Radford are looking to claim a record sixth (and consecutive) national title.
“All of our training mates are going to come with us and there’s an excitement in the air,’’ says Duhamel. “Each one of our national championships is special in its own way. Each one is special for different reasons.’’
Radford: “We’ve had so many memories and stories from past Canadian championships. Each championship is always very special and unique.”